I might have mentioned before that this is the fifth wettest year on record to date, so it is hardly surprising I guess that the two seasonal pools in the One Acre Wood are still full of water. When I say water, I think I really mean brown oak leaf tea or even primordial soup - it doesn't bear any resemblance to what comes out of taps or wells, that's for sure.
It might look disgusting, but it contains a lot of wild life, including mosquito larvae (I have the bites to prove that Mum at least is still around) and daphnia. The real novelty for us however, is that these old clay pits are actually ancestral ponds for common newts. We can't prove it, but there are also some more colourful versions knocking around that could be fire salamanders, but they are impossible to photograph.
The pits were dug to take advantage of the clay that the watershed is made from, also explaining the mix of trees we have in the One Acre Wood - chestnut for firewood for the kilns, oak for building, service for brewing and a very little pine for tapping for resin to give the local tiles their lustre.
This is the first year we have had water in the ponds until June, so the first time we have been aware of having newts. Very soon now their external gills will fall away and they will scatter through the woods and fields around to do whatever newts do. We caught this one to identify it and take a photograph and then gently released it back into the pond, to carry on doing what baby newts do - ideally eat all the mosquito larvae they can find!
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