Do the Right Thing!

It is always distressing when you really try to do the right thing for wildlife and then it turns out all wrong. Probably the worst case I’ve heard of was during a spell of very cold weather. Someone was very disturbed to see that birds couldn’t drink from the water bowl in their garden as it was frozen so, in a heroic act of great kindness, they put antifreeze in! Not to be recommended.

Recently I was told another tale which had nothing like the drastic effect of the antifreeze and I can assure you that no animals were harmed in the recounting of this story! It concerned newts. Now most people know what a newt is and if there is just one fact they know about them it is probably that they live in water. So recently when a garden was being tidied, the owner came across some newts underneath a pile of rubble and brick, and being quite perturbed by this she returned them to the pond.

Now this wouldn’t have harmed the newts at all, it probably just would have made them a bit grumpy. Newts only actually use the water for breeding so they only need it for about four or five months in the year. Once the breeding cycle is complete, the newts will haul themselves out the water and look for some cool, damp shady place to hibernate for the winter.  They are quite capable of walking long distances as they have been found up to a mile away from the nearest water.

What would have made the newts grumpier was finding that their ideal habitat for hibernating had been removed so they had to go and look for somewhere else to spend the winter. So, if you really want to help newts, which are lovely creatures to have living in your garden, leave a little bit of rubble and brick or log piles where they can contentedly sleep the winter away.

A newt out of water can understandably sometimes be mistaken for a lizard. A full grown newt and a young lizard can look similar but should you misidentify a lizard as a newt and try and put it back in the water it would indeed be more than a little grumpy, in fact it could be life threatening. Despite looking similar, newts are amphibians, and water is essential to their life cycle.  Lizards are reptiles that only need water for drinking.

You are likely to come across two types of lizard in your garden and one of those tries to pass itself off as a snake! A slow worm is, in fact, a legless lizard and will often use piles of grass cuttings or a compost heap in which to breed. The more ‘newt-like’ lizard you are likely to come across is the common lizard - but only if you have a largish garden on chalk or sandy soils. They are good for the garden as they feed on insects, particularly ants.

If you want to do the right thing by these animals in your garden, provide them with suitable habitats and create the right conditions for them; a pond for newts to breed in, along with dark, dank places in which they can hibernate. Lizards also hibernate and will benefit from a little bit of habitat creation, and above all no chemicals.

Having done that, you can sit back and bask in the glory that you are a real wildlife Samaritan. - www.sussexwt.org.uk

By Mike Russell Head of People and Wildlife at Sussex Wildlife Trust

Return To News Page