This week in Copenhagen, blue esculentus and alien alpestris

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krismunk
Posts: 395
Joined: June 7th, 2010, 6:17 am
Location: Copenhagen, Denmark

This week in Copenhagen, blue esculentus and alien alpestris

Post by krismunk »

Copenhagen herping is usually pretty uneventful.

This past week, however, a couple of quite surprising critters showed up.

On Tuesday, reports surfaced of a couple of alpine newts being found in the woods on the grounds of a castle in the northern suburbs. Alpine newts are in Denmark restricted to the extreme southeast of Jutland where the northernmost populations in the world appear so of course this had to be an introduced population.

Nevertheless, I was curious.

Pauline has ballet lessons close by so on Thursday after work I drove her to and from. I spent about an hour searching while she was dancing.

Alongside several of the usual suspects, smooth newts, common toads and ditto frogs, I found three alpine newts under cover on the forest floor.

Pretty as they are, the newts were not the most attractive herps of the day. That prize goes instead to an unusually beautifully coloured and patterned slate gray and orange common toad.

My hasty discount cell phone shots do not do the animals any justice.

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The next noteworthy report ticked in Wednesday. A blue edible frog had been found in a lake on the island of Amager.

There was a social event in Gustav's class at a nearby nature center so we decided to stop and see if we couldn't find the frog on our way home.

We had all but given up and were headed back towards the car when suddenly there it was. I don't know how you would label this kind of pigmentation defect but while I often find the freaks of the herp world rather ugly, this was simply gorgeous.

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