‘No newts is definitely not good newts.’
There, I feel better after getting that off my chest. Seriously, along with their cousins the frogs and toads, our three species of newts do seem to be getting steadily scarcer, though it has to be said that, with the possible exception of the natterjack toad, none of them is actually endangered.
At a glance they may look like lizards but they are in no way related. For one thing they tend to have smooth skins with a slightly soapy feel about them, and for this reason they are hard to pick up and hold. Lizards are able to thrive in warm dry habitats, whereas our newts need to keep their skins moist, otherwise they quickly dessicate and die. So they are rarely seen out in the open, especially in hot weather. And they are utterly dependent upon the water in which to breed.
Because they hide away in damp places they are not often seen, and for only about four months of the year are they to be found in the water, where they return annually to mate and to lay eggs.
The commonest of our newts, especially in the lowlands, tends to be the smooth species. Often found in garden ponds, it is no more than four inches or so long. The male is a handsome-looking beast (for a newt) with a long unbroken crest reaching along his back and tail from behind the head. Generously spotted with black, and highlighted with touches of orange and yellow, he must look the business to the smaller females, which are a pale earth-brown in colour. Courtship (yes really!) takes place under water, and involves the male quivering his body, curved with the tail towards the female, so that he wafts his male scent towards her. Quite heady stuff this, isn’t it!
Unlike the frogs and toads, which lay their eggs in clusters or in long strings, the female lays her eggs singly upon water plants, carefully wrapping each one with her hind feet in a leaf to conceal it from would-be predators. The tadpole is like a miniature version of its parent, except for two distinctive tufts of feathery gills, which stick out from either side of the head.
The great crested or warty newt is the largest of our species, and is the one specifically protected by law. The impressive male is mainly black on its back, with a warty skin, jagged crest, spotted and more highly coloured below than the smooth species. Altogether a more spectacular beast. The female too is smaller, similarly coloured, but larger than the smooth newt.
It prefers unpolluted farm or field ponds, although it occasionally turns up in garden pools. Here in Northamptonshire there are large colonies around Naseby, in field ponds created where the hurried mass burials of dead soldiers after the Great Civil War battle of 1645, led to subsidence as they decayed. These hollows filled with water, creating an ideal habitat for the newts!
The palmate newt is the least common and also the smallest species, often only about three inches long. It lack the bright colours of the other two species and has the hind toes webbed, while the end of the male’s tail looks as if it has been chopped off, leaving just a slender thread behind. The books tell us it is found mainly in the uplands, but as a boy I have netted it (too many years ago) in pools along a dried-up river bed near Northampton, while others have seen it at Higham Ferrers.
In July and August newts leave the water. Their skins thicken and they seek places to spend the winter. Under stones and logs, and deep within crevices where the air is constantly moist are likely places. I have found them by the hundreds in a damp cellar in Gloucester.
Needless to say newts are totally harmless. They have no teeth and feed entirely on small creatures they can seize and swallow. I once kept a male smooth newt which must have mistaken the end of my little finger as food while I was cleaning out his tank. I hadn’t realised until I removed my hand and there he was, clinging forlornly by his mouth. I cannot even claim that he gave me a nasty suck!
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