Nature walk gone wild

Last week G and I went over to Corie's house to play.

We had a lovely lunch and then decided to go down to the pond.

Corie and I were playing with the littler boys by the play structure when Callan came up asking if we knew anything

about THESE...

hard to tell how big they are from the pic, but they are about 8-12 inches long and a few inches thick.

They caught 3 at first and then the more we looked the more we found. We had a catch and release policy after the first few. Then as we worked our way around the pond I spotted these just under the surface. There were TONS.
When we got home we googled (how did we ever live without it?!) these little critters and turns out they are Oregon or Rough Skin Newts and the above sac is obviously its egg sac. We want to go back in a week or so and see if anything is wiggling in the sac. The eggs take about 20 days to gestate so they were fairly new as nothing was moving at all.

Amazingly, not only are these little critter poisonous, duh, yellow belly= danger! But they live to be 10-13 years old! So these huge ones we found were pretty old! Amazing! As grossed out as I was (no touching for me!) they are pretty cool!