The California Newt (also called the Orange-bellied Newt; Taricha torosa) lives most of the year in the woods among the dead leaves, eating slugs, bugs, and other things slow enough for a newt to approach, take into its mouth and swallow. Here's a young one in its usual habitat.

Newts look like lizards, which are reptiles and quick. Compare the newt with this lizard, photographed about 100 yards from the pond. Note the scales, long toes and claws.

Newts have no scales. They are actually amphibians -- members of the salamander family -- and they are slow. Adult California Newts are about six to eight inches long; the males are bigger than the females.

Around December and January they return to mate in the vernal pools or slow streams where they first emerged from eggs. There is a reedy pond about a mile up in the wooded hills south of Spring Lake Village in Santa Rosa, where I took pictures of a few of the many California Newts gathered there for the annual mating reunion.

The weather is cool and damp. There is no wind. The temperature is in the 40s, and the day is overcast, with the sun obscured or just visible as a bright place in the sky.

This is the winter home of these California Newts. Before the rainy season began, the reeds concealed whatever water the pond contained, but now it is full from the recent rains, rising well beyond the circle of reeds and out onto the grass meadow that surrounds it. The newts are on the bottom and the water is cloudy, but where it is shallow can you see them.

They spend a lot of time motionless or moving slowly, by either clasping the weeds or waving their tails like fish. During most of the year their tails are round like lizards’ tails, but for this aquatic interlude the males' tails have become flattened like fishes’ tails. There are hundreds of newts here, probably thousands, and many are quite visible as you walk along the water’s edge. Yet there are no herons, kingfishers or other birds or animals to feast on this abundance. In their world the newt is something that is left alone. Like the slow skunk, it would be easy prey, but it is seldom preyed upon. The newt’s skin contains a deadly poison called tetrodotoxin, like the poison of the puffer-fish the Japanese call fugu and that of certain deadly conchs. A newt would be the last meal of almost anything that might eat it, including humans.

At first I thought some of the newts had bright yellow eyes, but their eyes are really shiny black. If the eye looks yellow it is actually closed, covered by a bright yellow membrane. When newts are moving their eyes are open, but they are often covered with the yellow membrane when the newt is still. Are they sleeping?

A newt spends most of its time on the bottom, but every fifteen or twenty minutes it wriggles up to the surface, expels a bubble, takes a mouthful of fresh air and returns to the bottom. This one is about to wriggle back down after leaving his (her?) bubble, in which you can see the reflected silhouette of the photographer.

They're here, of course, to mate and reproduce. We can't see or understand the inter-newt communication that must be an important part of the process, but there's quite a bit of slow nuzzling and curling contact that’s going on, as well as the unmistakable act of mating. Here are three pairs, two of them getting acquainted and one pair in the characteristic mating posture. The male, an unusually large, pale newt with a mottled back, is on top of the smaller, more typically colored female, grasping her with both fore- and hind limbs.

The pair stayed this way for fifteen or twenty minutes, quite still or with only small, slow movements. Then, quite suddenly, the male wriggled away, rapidly for a newt, toward deeper water. He surfaced a minute later over by the reeds, left a bubble and quickly disappeared into the murk.

Here you can see lots of the gelatinous egg clusters in the grass. The clusters usually include from ten to twenty transparent eggs, each one with the nucleus clearly visible. As time goes by these nuclei will become recognizable embryos. The eggs stick to one another in the cluster, and also to the grass or weed that grows on the bottom. There are no egg masses where the bottom is bare mud, but where the bottom is green with grass and weed there are places where they carpet the bottom. Here the bottom slopes gently down from three to five inches deep.

Another visitor had left a single egg cluster on the grass beside the pond. It’s about an inch across.

I put it back in the water after photographing it. Who knows, if the eggs develop, maybe some of the young newts will be back here at the pond next winter.