GBR Press: The demented world of newts

THE TIMES (London, UK) 19 April 08 The demented world of newts - There's a lot of life lurking about in the dark rim of Peterborough (Simon Barnes)
It pains me to write these words. I mean that quite literally: sitting at a computer is seriously uncomfortable. That's because I ricked my back researching this column. Normally, when my back goes, it's because of something reasonably dashing and adventurous. A couple of years ago, I did it falling off a young horse I was schooling; last year I did it in the course of saving the rainforest.
Well, this time I did it in pursuit of newts. No, I didn't fall off a newt, nor did a newt turn and savage me or throw me to the ground. It's just the sort of thing that can happen when you lurk about in the dark on the rim of Peterborough. I was paying a visit to the excellent charity, Froglife, which concerns itself with amphibians and reptiles. Among plenty of other work, Froglife manages Hampton Nature Reserve, which is possibly the strangest landscape in lowland Britain. Its 300 acres contain more than 300 ponds, and the place is jumping with newts.
There are wild areas in this country, surreal, rather lawless places where people seldom go. You find them on the fringes of towns, on the fringes of industrial estates, by intersections of roads and railways, where windblown litter and fly-tippers compete with the spontaneous colonisation of wild things.
The Peterborough rim is such a place: between warehouses and outbreaks of light industry these badlands can be found. But right in the middle is a stretch of ancient industrial wasteland that has been designated a nature reserve. It is a wild and sinister place. It was used once for the extraction of clay for bricks. The process created a bizarre ridge-and-furrow landscape: but the ridges are 50 feet high and the furrows are filled with water. And, of course, newts.
This is the national stronghold for great crested newts: smooth newts also wiggle and squirm here wherever they can. Join me then: with a party of newt-hunters, not one of them even remotely like Ken Livingstone or Gussie Fink-Nottle. We set off together on to the surface of the Moon.
This is a landscape shaped by humans, but with no thought of human convenience. There is no human logic, no human rhythm: just a series of precipitous slopes slippery as glass, all of them leading inexorably to a pond. From the edge of these ponds, the city lights glows bizarrely above the level of the ridges. Above the traffic's hum, the occasional cry of bird: the honk of greylag geese and the oboeing of lapwings, birds that love the wild and the wet.
We made our way around the fringes of these mad ponds, shining a billion-candlepower light at their surfaces and revealing the mysteries below: scurrying beetles, voracious dragonfly larvae: and every now and then, newts. They are creatures caught between land and water, lovers of the damp and the dark, wriggling their feathery tails in the lamplight, seeking mates, laying eggs, making newts. The Froglife people were conducting their annual survey: in the winter, intense management work keeps this wild place wet and newt-friendly.
There is a strange beauty in this demented place, in these strange creatures, for nature is not all light and prettiness. It is also dark and mysterious and unknowable, and it takes places in the strangest of places. It is always good to be reminded of this, to see it, hear it, touch it. I returned to the familiar world, my body thrown drastically out of true by the crazy scrambling on these uneasy slopes: but my mind and heart reunited with the wild. Again.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/simon_barnes/article3774438.ece

Thank you for that, that was a good read.
Now if the man were to write a book in that style it would sell millions.
Entertaining and informative.

sounds like the writer really found himself, he/she certainly likes using adjectives, dont we all...

GBR Press 2005: ... I'm as happy as a newt

A previous effort on the same subject by the same journalist ...

THE TIMES (London, UK) 28 May 05 When they appear miraculously in the farm pond, I'm as happy as a newt (Simon Barnes)
There are certain people who get things done. They take things on and they get a result. It’s a gift: call it the gift of purpose. That’s why I got straight back from covering the football in Istanbul to meet my neighbour Rosie Norton. Rosie, you see, does newts. Among many other things. Toads, for example, and jumble sales. But it was newts I went to see her about.
Newts are employed in the second most inappropriate simile in the English language; judges, of course, being the overall winners. And newts, unlike judges, need water. They need ponds: and there aren’t as many ponds around as they are used to. Farmers no longer need them for watering livestock. So many ancient ponds get clogged up, dried up, scrubbed up: no good to man or newt.
So there were Rosie and I, hanging over ponds in Suffolk trying to see newts and newt spawn. With success: we found smooth newt, but alas, no great crested. That is the rarer newt: the sort that, I suspect, were the favourites of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Bertie Wooster’s friend.
If you spend time observing a pond — if, for example, you have a pond in your garden — you may discover, as I have done, that newts appear from nowhere. You filled the pond up with a hose and added no newt: and yet there are newts in the ponds, swimming and wriggling away.
Where did they come from? It is as if they appeared by spontaneous generation.
The truth is that they walk. They are tiny things and their legs look ill-suited to the task of cross-country hiking: but that is what they do. They walk from pond to pond, through the wet grass. They find 500 metres a reasonably comfortable stroll, and can cover up to a kilometre in extremis.
So a thriving newt community depends on a network of ponds no more than a kilometre apart. Rosie does more than look for newts. She also looks for ponds, and when she finds a sick pond, she brings it back to health, raising money to have contractors clear and renew what was once a sad, stinking little depression. Most of these are on farming land: many farmers, contrary to their bad press, are quietly proud of their wildlife. Ponds are part of the ancient countryside; revived and re-loved, they become part of the living countryside of right now. It just requires a particularly active and effective form of love.
Rosie’s speciality, as it happens. She also, as it happens, rescues lovelorn toads every February. Someone’s got to do it. I said I’d help next winter. We need more toads and newts in our lives, after all.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/simon_barnes/article527232.ece

I could read this mans work all day. He is a very informative yet laid back writer.
I myself have often wondered how far these creatures have travelled to arrive in my pond.
We have even sunk an old baby bath close to mine to put any spawn in, be it frog, newt or toad as we have fish in the pond.
Thank you again for the snippet Wes.

digger said:

Thank you for that, that was a good read.
Now if the man were to write a book in that style it would sell millions.
Entertaining and informative.

Click to expand...

Done and done, but on birdwatching