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/article/0,,1066-1630766,00.html