When I’m gardening I keep my Olympus Tough in my pocket, with LED macro diffuser fitted. These were drawn from some recent photographs.
Buff Ermine
Tag: Smooth Newt
Newt Party
Happy birthday last Friday to Connie, who enthusiastically organised a memorable newt survey of our garden pond last summer.
The final count of smooth newts was 22, of which only 5 were female, so in this sample less than a quarter of the population is female. This is despite the fact that on the occasions that I’ve seen a newt caught by a blackbird at the pond I’ve often spotted the bright orange belly of the male.
Newt Survey
My thanks to Connie, Sofia and Annabelle for doing a bit of pond dipping in our back garden yesterday. They reported a single large water beetle and the odd damselfly larva but they made no mention of tadpoles or young frogs. That might be because of the numbers of newts in the pond.
Final Results
Smooth Newts 22, of which only 5 were female, so in this sample less than a quarter of the population is female. On the occasions that I’ve seen a newt caught by a blackbird I’ve often spotted the bright orange belly of the male.
The Dance of the Smooth Newt
The tadpoles have gathered in the last remaining patch of sunlight in the corner of the pond, the same corner that the frogs gathered in when they spawned.
A male smooth newt stirs up sediment. He’s enticing a female who has been hidden away amongst the pondweed. He starts wafting his tail towards her then upends as if he’s breakdancing. The pair disappear amongst the vegetation.
Blackbird catching Newts
Over the past couple of days we’ve seen a female blackbird resting in the middle of the blanket of duckweed that covers most of our pond. She’s not bathing or struggling to get out. This evening I realise what she’s up to.
She grabs a newt from just below the water surface in front of her and immediately flies to an open grassy patch at the edge of the pond to peck at it. I don’t see whether she eats it there and then or whether she takes it off to feed to her young.
I’ve seen her stalking along the edge of the pond on the look out, I now realise, for any unwary newt that might surface. Our resident newts are smooth newts. Unlike the great-crested newts they don’t have special protection under the Wildlife and Countryside Act but would this female blackbird care if they did? I think not.
I’ve seen her once before with a successful catch which she took to the raised bed behind the pond. I could see her prey was a long and flexible creature but at the time I couldn’t positively identify it.
Pond Pyramid
This female blackbird is at the top of a pond food chain, at the apex of a food pyramid, but she’s not the top predator around here; she runs the risk of being incorporated into the food chain of one of the local sparrowhawks or domestic cats. 
The newts are predators in their own right; I’ve watched them eating newly emerged frog tadpoles. The tadpoles, at this early stage of their lives, are eating the algae that grows on the clump of frogspawn.
From thin air, just add water . . .
I find it amazing that you can start with sunlight, water and carbon dioxide and in a few links along the food chain end up with a blackbird.
Although my aim is to build a little eco-system in the back garden, I do think that I ought to tweak the chances of survival for the newts by clearing some of the duckweed so that the blackbird can’t sit in wait at the centre of the pond.
Update
Two days later, on Saturday, Barbara spotted the blackbird catching a newts again, five in total. I spent five minutes raking the duckweed to the edges of the pond which should make it impossible for the blackbird to perch in the middle of the pond and give some additional cover to the newts when she is stalking around the margins.
Blue Damselflies
2.30 p.m.; Common blue damselflies are mating down by the pond, the blue male clasping the olive female.
She rests on the water surface as she carefully lays an egg on a submerged leaf of pondweed then the pair move on to lay the next.
There are smooth newts lurking below. One grabs a female and swallows her head end first, the two wings protruding from its mouth.
I watch for a few minutes. The males zip around like little blue neon tubes, chasing each other and resting in the sun together on the leaves of plants around the pond.
The pairs flying in tandem continue to lay, often just inches from a waiting newt below.
Pond-dipping the Movie
WE CAUGHT smooth newts, freshwater leeches and pond snails in one of the ponds at Hassacarr nature reserve, Dunnington Common, near York on this morning’s Wakefield Naturalists Society field meeting. This is only the second occasion on which I’ve tried out the possibilities of underwater movies using my Olympus μ Tough so using the iMovie app I’ve put together a few clips in this YouTube video.
Sketching the newt as it swam around the tank gives some impression of its movements but you can’t improve on the video clip in the way it shows the looping movement of the leech.
Tubular Water Dropwort
Tubular Water-dropwort, Oenanthe fistulosa, grows around the edges of the largest pond. It one of the rarer species to be found on the reserve, declining as its wetland habitats disappear.
Around York, a city long famous for its flooding, wetlands is sometimes seen as prime real estate. Earlier this year one developer was frustrated that his plan to build an out of town department store was held up for several months because the resident population of great crested newts had to be relocated.
We found no great crested today at Dunnington but they are often found on pond-dipping days on the reserve.