Sober truth about newts
What a pity your reporter chose to put such a negative slant to her article about the great crested newt (February 22).
What a pity your reporter chose to put such a negative slant to her article about the great crested newt (February 22).
It reads as though she has deliberately set out to persuade her readers that the creature and the law protecting it are some kind of unwanted national problem in regard to development and building, when from an ecological and conservation standpoint, it should be the other way around.
This sort of reporting can undo years of education and enlightenment by naturalist, scientists and conservationists. I get the impression she regards the law covering their protection as misguided, or some kind of joke, with the implication being that these creatures, and others like them, are of no real value or significance and should just be ignored in the name of progress.
There seems to be a tendency with some reporters to reduce matters to a farce: witness the claim of the three "solitary" newts and the cost of their removal to Cheshire County Council. That was misleading and gave a totally false picture.
You cannot have a habitat containing just three newts: there would be progeny from the previous breeding season which would have metamorphosed and dispersed into the surrounding environment. Since each female lays between 200 to 300 eggs, it would be virtually impossible to locate them once they had reached the land stage of their development.
The methods used to net and trap them only result in the recovery of adult specimens returning to pools to breed. Should the pool be filled-in, the remaining juveniles will find their habitat gone on reaching maturity.
The "fact file" accompanying the feature itself contained a few errors: the crested newt is only rare in Europe, where there has been development and changes to land use; in many places it is quite common.
As regards England, it is certainly not what could be described as common! It is widespread in geographical sense, but its distribution is local and fragmented since it prefers chalk or limestone areas. As for being extinct in Ireland, this is absurd since the creature never existed there in the first place!
P Bryce, Shenstone Avenue, Stourbridge.
