Balkan Green Lizard

Me and my friends were going for a walk to my dad's forest garden when I saw a huge tale in a rock pile so I decided to check out what it was I lifted up a rock and I saw the most amazing, beautiful Balkan green lizard! I caught it and bought it home so I could film it and on the way I saw about another 5 or 6 Balkan green lizards. So me and my friends ran to our house to film theses astounding lizards. By the time we had got their they had all gone :( We waited some time for them to come back but they didn't. We filmed the one we had caught and then we went to let it go back in its rock pile.
We put it on a rock where the blazing sun was shining and it just stood their sun bathing, it decided to stay their so we watched it for a little bit and then walked home.


Here is a video of it

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My new gopro hero camera

Hey guys i'm doing a short blog review of my Gopro :)
Check out the video.

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Hope you like it!!

THERE IS ONE PROBLEM ABOUT THIS CAMERA. IT DOESN'T HAVE GOOD SOUND! 

Baby Fire Salamanders

My Dad and I went for walk to find some fire salamanders in the mountains. I was really excited because my Dad said that the last time he came here he saw 7 or 8 Fire salamanders so I was expecting  to see some. We went when it was  raining because that's when the salamanders come out,they like the damp. As soon as we got there I ran ahead hoping to find one. I was searching and searching but we didn't find any yet so I started to get anxious that we weren't going to find any. I asked Dad if we could go home because there weren't any there, but he insisted that we should keep going.  I really wasn't up for it! I don't know why I kept going but I did. We walked up for about another 10 minutes when I looked over to Dad and I saw that even he was beginning to doubt that there were any there. We started to see little pools on the rocky road and there was algae in them. My dad said these pools must have been there a long time because their is algae in them, and you might find baby fire salamander in it. He pushed away the algae and there they were - 6 or 7 baby fire salamander ( I think dad was more surprised than me :)!)  My Dad commented on what a coincidence it was!!!!. By they way this has happened a few times to our family. Once when I was about 8 we went to a lake and I told my dad imagine if  a grass snake popped up its head out of the water and swum over to our direction ......and to our surprise it did!!!!!  Once, when my dad and I went for a walk I told him, imagine if we see a Fire salamander, and we flipped out because as soon as I said that I saw one walking across our path!!! . Anyway, we filmed the baby fire salamanders and went home. But I still think it would have been MUCH better if we had seen an adult!

Baby fire salamanders

        

Toad Hunting

Common toads mating

I was walking down to our pond when I heard a matting call of a common toad , that's when I had the idea to go to a lake next our village, . I wanted to record how they mate and how their toad spawn looked I knew a great place where toads gather in the spring to mate. I set off with my bike and finally got there after about 20 minutes and I was really, really tired so I sat  down for a little bit and then I went to find some toads. I could hear their mating calls so I knew they were there.  It only took me about 1 minute to find a toad it was swimming in the water looking for a mate. As soon as it saw me it tried to dive down into the water but it was too slow so I managed to catch it. It started to croak its alarming call and all of a sudden all the toad croaks stopped.  I was panicking for a bit because I  thought they had probably gone underwater to hide, but after 10 seconds they started to croak again :) I filmed the toad for a while then I let it go.  Whilst I was letting it go I realized that there was loads and loads of frog spawn on the dry mud which means the water level must have dropped. So I started to put the frog spawn back into the water, then I went back to catching toads. I could see hundreds of toads but lots of them were very far away in the water. The next toads I saw were mating, I picked them up and they were stuck to each other like glue. I filmed them a little bit too and then let them go in the water. I saw another toad about 1 meter away from me and I thought  to myself, "I must get it!" . I've been here before so I already knew a couple of tricks of how to get a toad far away from you.  This trick has worked on all the toads I caught on this trip, but this only works in mating season '-  here is what you need to do! First put your hand in the water, it doesn't matter if the toad isn't watching your hand, after you have put your hand in the water start shaking it and the toad will swim as fast as it can to try and grab on to it and  will try to mate your hand LOL. The toad thinks that your shaking hand is a female toad splashing around in the water. Here is a video of me shaking my hand and the toad coming to grab it. It took me about a hour to get home because I was very tired. The next day I went again to find a female so I could bring it back to the pond to that they could mate.

                

Re-repairing Our Small Pond

We noticed that our small pond was leaking because there was a big hole in the liner, so we decided to repair it. We bought some new thick plastic and doubled it over and used it to line our new pond.  We drained all the water out, moved the water plants out carefully so that the roots didn't brake, threw all the dirty mud on our plant beds as mulch and threw away the old liner. After that we started to put the new plastic in the pond. When we had finished putting it in we started to pour clean water into the pond. Whilst we were pouring in the water I noticed a larvae on the ground. I picked it up and realized that it was a dragonfly larvae that we had disturbed when removing all of the mud out of the pond. At first I thought it was dead but then my Grandad told me to put it in water just to be sure. I told him there wasn't any point as I knew it was dead, but my Grandad insisted.  I put the larvae in some water and to my surprise it started swimming. I was shocked because it looked dead and it was very light. Then I thought there must be a lot of them there so I started to look for them in the mud that my granddad had thrown away on the beds, and sure enough I found another one!! The second one I found was as big as my thumb which is about 5 cm long. Then my Grandma started to look for them and she found another one. We decided to put them in a big bucket of water until the pond was finished. We got back to work filling the pond with rain water but every now and then I kept looking for more dragonfly larvae and I found another 5 but 2 of them had already died ;(  so all together there were 5 dragonfly larvae which was epic!!! It took us about 2 hours to finish the pond and it looked GREAT!!! The water was clean, it wasn't dirty and there were no dead insects in it. So after we had finished making the pond we put in the dragon fly larvae  and I watched them swim around for a little bit.  Then we went inside to have lunch.

Me and my grandma looking for dragonfly larvae

Just put in the new liner

Pouring in the water

 

Finishing up the pond

               

Dragonfly larvae

The new pond finished 

Pond Life In The Winter- Dragonfly's

What do dragonflies do in the winter? Most of the the fully grown dragonflies will die before winter approaches, however some adult dragonflies will MIGRATE south and will spend the winter as adults there!! Not many insects are active in the winter, but the dragonfly larvae are. In the winter the larvae will swim around in icy ponds. They will live underwater in winter and feed and grow throughout the season becoming adults in early spring.  Once when I was watching a little fish swim around in the shallows of our pond, I saw how a dragonfly nymph jumped out of the sand, grabbed a little fish and swum under the sand with the dead fish in its mouth!!!
  

Here is some pictures of  dragonflies  I saw  at a festival  

Pond life in the winter- Pond skaters and Water boatman

Pond skaters- Pond skaters do not spend all their time on the water, in autumn they will fly far away from the water to hibernate through the winter. The Pond skaters will emerge from hibernation in the warm spring. I watch them with amazement as they eat their prey (normally flies or insects).  They stand on the water patiently until a fly or some kind of insect falls in the water and then they will jump on the prey and start demolishing their victim. But how do they know that an insect has fallen in the pond so far away????  They can sense the vibrations and ripples on the water when some thing falls or flies in it!!   

Common Pond Skater eating an ant!

Water boatman-  In winter most of these insects can survive, even under a thick layer of ice. They row very slowly under the ice looking for a trapped air bubble. They fill up their own air supply with the air of a bubble and then dive down to the bottom. When the water gets really cold they will still survive, in fact in one way it is better for them in the winter!?why? Because the ice cold water contains more oxygen. The bubbles are also normally larger in winter than summer. According to some people, if water boatman freeze they can simply thaw out and start swimming around again in spring!


  

Water boatman

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