About half a mile up the track into the forestry above our house there's a small pond which has formed in an aggregate quarry. When we first moved to Golspie we found some newts in it, despite it being very exposed and lacking in pond vegetation. More recently the newts seemed to have disappeared - until yesterday evening when we were taking a stroll and saw....
....what looked like one of the more common smooth newts (also called the common newt). However, when I looked carefully at the photos....
....where three of them appear to be in the mating business, one - the top one - clearly showed webbing between the toes of its rear feet. This is a breeding characteristic of the less common male palmate newt, seen....
....even more clearly in this picture.
Of some concern to us is that the digger has obviously been active in the last few days removing rock from the quarry but there are a couple of good signs. One is that four large rocks have been placed between the digger and the pond (to the digger's right in this picture) and, secondly, the pond hasn't been damaged, both of which seem to indicate that the digger driver is aware of the newts. Let's hope so!
About half a mile up the track into the forestry above our house there's a small pond which has formed in an aggregate quarry. When we first moved to Golspie we found some newts in it, despite it being very exposed and lacking in pond vegetation. More recently the newts seemed to have disappeared - until yesterday evening when we were taking a stroll and saw....
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