Great Crested Newts get a lot of bad press.
The stock newspaper story these days about these beautiful animals is ‘newts get in the way of my school/hospital/grandmothers funeral’ (you can add your own deserving cause here which is stopped or disrupted, at great cost, by the animals presence).
Just search the sceptical press for the word ‘newt’ and you will see what I mean (see here and here). And I sometimes feel they do have a bit of a point – for £60,000 we could build 100 new high quality, clean and unpolluted in the Million Ponds Project. And a million pounds – well, that’s a lot of new ponds.
So it was good to see a bit of sympathetic (if sad) coverage of crested newts getting into a local paper following the report here of Sally’s dead Great Crested Newts in her Shropshire garden.
This short paean to newts is from the Shropshire Star.
