This weekend I spotted something in The Puddles… It seems we have at least one newt, though how it got there is unknown. It might have arrived as an egg with the aquatic plants, since The Puddles haven’t really been in place long enough for any breeding to take place this year.
It’s impossible to take a photo of him/her, though, as the wee newcomer keeps to the dark corners of it’s puddle, but I’m pretty sure it’s a Lissotriton vulgaris since that’s the most common type of newt in Denmark.
So one more success for The Puddles, eh? And who knows what else might be hiding in the murky depths (okay, they’re one foot deep)…
(Oh, and this morning I was woken up by the bed shaking. Quite confusing, but it turns out there was an earth quake in the Kattegat Sea between Denmark and Sweden at bit before 5am. Damage report: A candle in the sitting room fell out of its candle stick! Oh, the drama…)
Oh earthquakes can be scary. how cool a newt.
Earth quakes are not very scary here in Denmark; they are more likely to knock over a candle than a house, so it’s really just a curious natural phenomenon to us.
And newts are way cool! I’m really chuffed that I’m seeing this sort of wildlife in the first year of The Puddles!
I’m so impressed with the wildlife you’re attracting to your ‘puddles’. I bought some more oxygenating plants last weekend and the water is looking a lot better. Maybe now something might want to live in there!
Years ago there was a mild earthquake near where we lived. It was just as we were going to sleep. The house did shake, enough to wonder what it was. As I elbowed Wellyman to alert him he just grunted, half asleep, ‘that must be the shaking then’ and promptly fell asleep. It was only in the morning that we knew it had been caused by an earthquake but it was nice to know Wellyman was ready to spring to my rescue in the face of any imminent danger!
I feel very validated by the wildlife. Initially I thought that I was perhaps being a bit silly, sinking three plastic tubs into the ground, but they have really taken to it, both insects and amphibians. The balance is still not quite right, of course; there is a tendency to algae in one of The Puddles, and another one has a visible population of mosquito larvae, but all in all it seems they are doing just what I dreamt they’d do; bring different animals to the garden!
(The Flâneur Husband, too, was suitably unimpressed that I’d survived an earth quake… He had gone back to town the night before, and either way he is a firm sleeper so he wouldn’t have been woken up by it anyway. I guess you and I would both have to carry our sleeping husbands out of the building, were a serious quake ever to hit our latitudes!)
How nice that wildlife has already taken up residence in your puddles. Clearly the word has gotten out that this is an up-and-coming address!
As I mentioned to my Mum the other day, the next step must be attracting an otter! Or failing that, the next step is to avoid the water growing green…
Anyway, I’m rather pleased that something that really started out as a small garden folly is actually doing something useful for the biodiversity in the garden. I had hoped it would, but this is beyond expectations.
Oh, ‘murky depths’– I hope nothing too frightening spontaneously generates there. A very small dragon might be nice…
“Welcome to Loch Flâneur”, in other words… I could easily imagine myself as a dragon-tamer! Who knows if I might not have mistaken a tiny baby-dragon for a newt?
Oh the drama! – of a newt
that is a great sign of life in the puddles, I’m always fascinated how things are taken over and used, and in your case it shows the puddles are good and healthy !
If animals want to live there, surely it can’t be all bad!
I’m really excited about the diversity, and it helps keep the mosquitoes out of The Puddles, which is obviously a crucial success factor.