The warmer sunny weather and the onset of our seasonal wild duck visit prompted me to check our now very overgrown pond for emerging amphibians. Our Common newts, Lissotriton vulgaris, seem to be loving the pondweed full freshwater habitat, which having been left largely unmanaged for 7 year, now has little remaining open water. The Common newts were plentiful, affording me the chance to enjoy observing this male cleverly using an uncurling new Water lily leaf as cover to stealthily creep up on its prey.
Sadly there was no sign of any frogs or frogspawn as yet and its getting late even for Norfolk, in past years we had Tadpoles swimming about by now. It’s looking likely that the local population has been struck by a rampant viral disease called Ranavirus (oh, the irony) perhaps also being adversely affected by habitat loss from local development nearby. If you are inspired to build a wildlife pond of your own and are offered or come across some frogspawn, please dont take it and introduce it to your pond so as to avoid the risk of spreading this ambhibian disease further.