We call him tiny because...

As everyone likes and looks forward to a Bank Holiday Monday…

…can we have one every week?

Missed as a newt

It was newt transfer day, from their old, small, dank dark and smelly hole in the ground, to the new Olympic-sized newt facility. At the outside, looking at the clogged up, tiny old pond, you’d’ve guessed maybe twenty of them, tops. Or they would’ve been out protesting the overcrowding with little plackards criticising their slum landlords. We must’ve moved about fifty or sixty of them, all sizes, to their new home.

What started as a fairly simple exercise: empty out pond, catch as many as we can, fill in old pond; rapidly became bit of a mission: we’re not losing or leaving a single newt behind – not on this watch.

Small though it was, it took some bailing out, using a tiny plastic bucket and straining every drop of water through the net. To give an idea of the size of the bucket, I think it was rejected from the playgroup sandpit for being too small. Bright blue, red handle. That bucket is indelibly imprinted on my memory.

I hope some newt homing-instinct doesn’t kick in, and that they don’t all go back to their drying out old place. I’m going to have to Google newts and find out if they do that cat thing where the owners move to Canada, and the cat turns up on their old doorstep in Canning Town.

Now I’m confused, because some newts are aquatic, and others are amphibious. Which ones have we got? They’ve got gold bellies, are otherwise camouflage drab colours, cute huge back feet (edit – some of them have huge back feet), and they don’t seem to suffer immediately they’re out of the water, but neither do we ever see them wandering about on dry land.

Their skin leaks, and they absorb oxygen and nutrients through it, so they’re a bio indicator of a clean environment. New Hampshire has a newt as its symbol (whatever that means).

They’re in trouble in these parts, because man is destroying their natural habitats. I don’t buy that religious and political line that we’re some superspecies and everything else is just here for our convenience, for us to kill, eat bits of, throw the rest away, exterminate into extinction, slash and burn farm, shove into burger buns, etc. Taking up that moral and ethical argument, that we can do what we can because we can, we’re only here as flesh for any potentially man-eating species to sink their teeth into.

When I Googled ‘newt’ two of the proposed searches were newts for sale and newts doll. If there’s money in newt-breeding, I think we’ve found something we’re good at. I take it the other suggestion is Newt’s doll, from the Aliens film.