Swimming with dragons

Photo  and  text av Rudolf Svensen

The tiny little newt is sitting tight on my finger. It hinders my movements while I am swimming in this small pound, trying to capture good images of the Great Crested Newts (Triturus cristatus) which are gathered here to mate and spawn. For almost an hour I have tried to photograph these beautiful amphibians without any luck. They are very careful animals and as soon as I get to close to them, they disappear down in the soft mud or swims away from me, and suddenly I have got the opposite problem. The newt on my finger is to close to photograph.

Just 2 hours earlier we had arrived at the pound tired and sweaty. The newts had found their pound on a mountain top on the South-West coast of Norway. It was quite a job to climb up the mountain with the rucksack loaded with diving gear and photo equipment. It was a good feeling to pull on the wetsuit and slide into the cool wet home of the newts. In May, this pound is loaded with newts, but unfortunately there are no rules that it is easy to capture good images even if there are heaps of photo motives. A human being is anyway not created to swim in a pound only half a metre deep without stir up mud, so the challenges were massive.

Even if things usually look difficult in the start, it is always a good thing to have lots of patience and see how the situation develops. I was photographing a diving beetle larvae hunting when a female newt came swimming alongside me, rested on a stone and curiously watched me. I captured some photos and then stretched out a finger and carefully poked her. When you do something like this, you expect the animal to make of, but not this little lady. She jumped from the stone, glided through the water and landed on my finger. I had apparently got a new friend.

Even with a 5 mm wetsuit covering my body, it comes to a point where the cold water chases me on shore. I have got the images I wants and the visibility is not longer as it should be when trying to capture good underwater images.
Shivering I undress, but we are not finished yet. To get images of the orange belly of the newts, we have to put them in an aquarium. Soon a male and a female are swimming in the aquarium without even looking stressed. My youngest son finds a small frog, still with its tadpole tail on. He want to photograph this too and puts it in the aquarium with the two newts. Fast as a lightning attack the male newt the little frog and swallows it before anyone can photograph either frog or newt.

The Great Crested Newt is not only a beautiful amphibian or a good friend for swimming photographers. It may also be a fierce dragon.
 

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