Friday, March 20, 2020
A visit to the Coigach area on a lovely day (but still cold) brought few birds - a little grebe at Old Dornie being a first for the year.
On the way out I took a look in the curious, squarish little moorland pools right by the road that have held both frogspawn and toadspawn in past years; I'm not sure how these pools formed and it may be that they are manmade, and something to do either with drainage of the road, or with nearby peat diggings.
Today the wind was ruffling the surface of the water which was already murky; I could see no spawn and it was only in the last pool that I spotted two toads, crawling over submerged rocks.
And then I saw something I've never seen before in these pools - a newt! It glided out from the shelter of the weeds and there was a sudden skirmish and a roiling of the water; I didn't see exactly what happened, but it seemed that one of the toads had had a go at the newt. Perhaps it was just objecting to the presence of another creature in its spawning place, or maybe it "knows" that the newt is there to feed on its tadpoles. Or perhaps it was just trying to catch it to eat, as toads apparently eat anything that moves!
// posted by Christine @ 3:23 PM 
