Now, there's a novelty for town planners - building so as to convenience a bunch of newts. Not just ordinary newts, of course, but, reputedly about thirty thousand of them, great crested newts at that. We here often cannot endure a few substantial and venerable trees. "They take the light away." But the newts are taken so seriously that, according to a report in the London Times, after biological survey and consultations, when a new town is being built over their old home, they are to be moved to a specially created 296 acre wildlife reserve.
bow this was claimed to be the biggest group of this protected species in Europe and the World Wide Fund for Nature did not want them to be moved. The company which is building the new town has already spent £750,000 on the project, is committed to long term management and an educational facility, and the spending of a further million. And, it is said, there will also be concern for rare plants and wild life. Several of the lakes to be created, it is said, as well as the home for newts, will become SSSI - Sites of Special Scientific Interest.
Suppose the newts don't thrive. Suppose they find their new waters uncongenial and set out - for their old haunts, only to be mashed under the wheels of cars or gobbled by cats and other predators as they wander after their own home? Well, it will be said, the authorities did their best. A year after the newts are moved, you'd like to hear how they are getting on.
This new town is at Peterborough and, privately funded, is not a super sized housing estate, the builders explain, but in fact will have the full services of a town.
whoever comes across a newt today, scientific people excepted? In childhood, when splashing around in streams and ponds is one of the great joys of even suburban life, you get to know them mostly at frog spawn time. Now that we are by law forbidden from moving spawn around, youngsters are losing out on something rare and delicate. In colour, grace and now rarity, newts can be one of the thrills of childhood not ever forgotten. And sometimes kept for a while in the classroom tank by an enlightened teacher, for just long enough, and then returned to its natural home?