The Otters’ Tale

Cruising the pools, she’d use her super-sensitive whiskers to pick up the vibration of a fish. Arching her body, she’d dive head first, deep under the surface, preparing to hunt the fish from below. Sometimes if the moon was bright she’d see the outline of the fish above her, but more often it was her whiskers that were her guide. Propelling herself upwards with her webbed feet and powerful tail strokes, she’d accelerate towards her prey. For a moment she’d have the advantage of surprise, but fish are no slouches when it comes to sensing vibration; their lateral line, which runs the length of their body, is as good as any whisker sense and usually enough to grab that two-yard start. From then on it is ten seconds of life or death for the fish, success or failure for the otter. The two swim, leap, crash, weave and dive, creating mayhem in the pool as Kuschta tries to grab the fish in her mouth.

You might be tempted to think that the otter holds all the cards in this showdown, but in truth failure is the accepted outcome. What otters have is total determination; that instinct to try and try again. There are few hiding places for a good-size fish. In general they have to keep moving to survive. Movement equals vibration. Vibration equals discovery. When an otter has found a fish once, it will find it time and time again. Unsuccessful chases will be followed by more unsuccessful chases until, through tiredness or error on its part, a fish ends up clamped between those whiskery jaws or the otter accepts that the fish has won the day this time.

Approaching the eel pool, Kuschta aligned herself with one of the gaps in the weir that spouted water into the pool, knowing this to be the perfect cover for her attack. As she flopped over the lip she allowed the current to carry her out into the midst of the pool, the turbulence masking any evidence of her arrival. She really didn’t have to expend much effort along the way, just use her tail and paws to course correct until the back eddy bought her to a gentle halt. In the still night dark she hung in the water, its pace now very slow as the champagne bubbles dissipated around her. Weightless and drifting, Kuschta was alert to the slightest movement – her whiskers, her eyes. A few yards off she sensed a fish coming her way, but before she could dive, it turned away. The fish were there, that much she knew. All she had to do was find one.

Calm to the task, Kuschta curved her body, using a slow tail beat to rotate in a wide circle, using eyes, ear and whiskers to scan the full circumference of the pool, the eddies, bubbles and swirls breaking the flat surface. Somewhere out there she sensed, rather than saw or heard, another fish slowly swimming away, unaware of her presence. Perfect. She arched her back, slid beneath the water, and when she was a few feet submerged she started to home in on the fish in a rising diagonal. As she gathered speed the distance between them narrowed. Advantage Kuschta. But not for long. The fish felt her coming as the bulk of her body pushed a sonic bow-wave ahead which reached him just before she did. That fraction of a second warning was enough to alert him to the danger. In a moment he went from languid to panic, his body squirting forward, flexing for speed as if electrified. Accelerating away, the gap widened, but that suited Kuschta just fine. The more the fish panicked the easier he was to track, as the chatter of vibrations came back to her through her whiskers. She hung on in his wake, letting her stamina blunt his speed. Across the pool they went, the distance narrowing with each yard as they headed for the far bank. For the fish the bank equalled safety, a chance to throw off his pursuer amongst the roots and undercuts. Kuschta knew this and put on extra speed to close the gap, getting herself close enough to lunge at the fish. In that final effort she bunched her body, then exploded forward, but just as her nose brushed the flank of the fish it twisted away, her jaws closing on nothing but water.

Kuschta surfaced for air, emitting a sharp cough as otters are apt to do after underwater effort – whether it is a reflex action, a clearing of the air passages or a prelude to a sharp intake of breath, I do not know, but it was to become one of the sounds that I will forever associate with otters. Head in the air and eyes shining bright, she readied for the next attack, wheezing as she gradually recovered her breath. She knew she only had to wait. All stirred up by the chase, the fish would be radiating vibrations, uncertain where to hide or swim. It would not take long for it, or maybe another fish equally disturbed by Kuschta’s presence, to come back into her orbit. And sure enough, one came straight towards her at speed, whipping past and giving her only enough time to dive down at it. But her effort was more sound and fury than effect, as the fish was already out of danger by the time she had completed the lunge. Unconcerned, she paddled after the fish; sometimes she kept it close, other times it faded into the distance, until she picked up the tell-tale signs again. Around and across the pool they went. The pursued and the pursuer. For the trout it was about staying alive. For Kuschta it was about food. For both, in different ways, it was about survival.

Soon Kuschta sensed the fish was tiring, the sprints of flight slowing with each passing chase. Suddenly she felt the fish to her right, the two of them swimming parallel. This was her chance. One swift dive, turn and boom and she’d grabbed the fish by the soft underbelly. As the fish tensed and twitched she drove her teeth deep into its flesh, asserting her grip. She knew it wasn’t the perfect hit, more to the tail than the head, allowing the trout to thrash and twist its body, but changing the grip of her jaws was no option. She’d learnt from bitter experience that was how meals escaped. So with the trout whipping about her head she swam for shore, digging her sharp claws into the bank to heave herself and the fish onto the grass. Subduing the fish by shaking it hard, Kuschta held it down with her front paws, let go of the belly and bit hard behind the head, extinguishing all life bar a few death twitches.

Otters don’t gloat in victory, they simply get down to the job in hand, consuming the capture. Kuschta was too hungry to care anyway, tearing into the flesh, eating as much and as fast as she could. After twenty minutes, with the head and the best end of the fish safely in her belly, she paused to clean herself, licking away the smatterings of blood, scales and flesh. Silent and content, she settled down to rest for a while before she would finish the fish then head back to the rotten willow. But a noise in the distance changed all that. Up on the beam she knew so well, a figure appeared. An otter – bigger than any she had ever seen before. It first sniffed suspiciously at the ground where she had lain then tested the air. She froze as it held its head in her direction. For a moment she thought it was going to leap into the pool and head directly over to her, but it was distracted by another otter, more the size of Kuschta’s mother, which came up by his side.

As the two nuzzled and groomed at each other’s fur, Kuschta knew her time in the only place she had ever called home was over. The larger of the two was not an otter she recognised; the other may have been her mother but she could not be sure. Though part of her yearned to do it, she suspected, quite rightly, that no good would come of her revealing her presence. It was time to go. Edging away from the river, she headed for the woods and, keeping the sound of the water just within earshot, continued downstream for an hour or more. Moving on land is tiring for otters; yes, they can run quicker than you might think, with a gait not dissimilar to that of a greyhound, but given a choice, it is water at times of flight. Back in the river, Kuschta swam as fast as she could. Soon there were no more familiar landmarks, every fresh stroke taking her to a place she didn’t know. In the space of two days and two nights she had lost her mother and her home. She was alone and afraid.

At dawn she could swim no further; her body was chilled to the core by too much time in the water. Dragging herself onto the bank, she shook herself like a dog, sniffed the ground and then padded through the long grass, occasionally stopping to sit up and look around. Soon she spied a dense clump of brambles not far from the edge of the river. Finding an opening, she pushed her way into the middle, the tendrils, laden with bullet-hard red blackberries still a month away from ripening, swinging closed behind her, keeping her safe from prying eyes and unexpected visitors. It was far from perfect, but for now, with the ground dry and the leaf mould soft, she gave into the sleep that her exhausted body craved.

Otters are not by choice nomadic, but in the months immediately after fleeing the eel pool Kuschta had few choices but to become so. Like all her breed, when fit and fed she was capable of covering great distances, but that was borne out of necessity, not choice. In her search for a place to call home, Kuschta found each successive territory occupied, and was forced to move on when her arrival became patently unwelcome.

That is the thing about otters. We tend to think of them as gregarious, social animals – the Disneyesque vision of a pellucid pool, ringed with trees, which is fed by a tumbling waterfall where the pups frolic and play whilst the parents keep an all-seeing eye as they sun themselves stretched out on the warm rocks. However, the truth is somewhat different; otters are really not very social animals. Once Kuschta had adapted to a life alone, it was the life she preferred. Of course she would join with another when the time for mating arrived, splitting immediately afterwards to become the dutiful single parent for as long as required, but once the pups were gone she’d return to the solitary life, the default choice for her species. Being non-social is all very well but it does require a space to claim as your own, and that was increasingly Kuschta’s problem. Everywhere she went was occupied by people or otters.

A millennium of persecution has taught the otter a lot about people, not much of it good. Otters have learnt to be invisible, shunning the day and hugging the night. Where the river took Kuschta through towns she just kept swimming by night, staying in the shadows, so that people were oblivious to her presence. Sometimes she was forced to hole up for the day, but it was never a problem; culverts, outflow pipes and all manner of structures were plenty good enough for a layover until darkness returned. At first this was all very unfamiliar, but in her travels Kuschta soon learnt that she was, at least in respect of animals other than her own kind, top dog. The apex predator, as the biologists like to call species such as Lutra lutra. There might have been a time when wolves or bears roamed the British Isles that otters had something to fear, but today they firmly reside at the top of a food chain, upon which no other creatures prey. It is a pretty exalted place to be, but in every society – even within that of apex predators – a structure evolves with the weak at the bottom and the strong at the top. Kuschta, still a few months off physical and sexual maturity, was trying to find her place in that new order.

Otters are territorial creatures, but claiming homelands in a way that is really quite unusual, for despite all the attributes of a creature fit for fighting – lean, lithe, strong claws and sharp teeth – they choose another path. For aggression read avoidance. Apart from the rare occasion when two rutting males clash, they are the most anti-confrontational of animals, a trait which they achieve by the delicately phrased term of sprainting.

Spraints, to put none too fine a point on it, are defecations – markers set out along the river bank telling of who ‘owns’ which territory. If you are an otter you can tell a lot about your fellows from a simple sniff – age, sex, status, fertility – they are all there in the musky scent. Marking out your patch is a neverending task. Typically otters will cover anywhere from a quarter to a third of their territory on any given night, making thirty to forty deposits, far more than required by any digestive tract. Maybe this goes some way to explaining the origin of the word spraint, which comes from the French épreindre, which means ‘to squeeze out’. The effort is neverending because the scent only lasts for just so long – a few days at most – requiring regular reinvigoration. Otters are creatures of habit when it comes to these marks, using the same place time and time again. Keen otter trackers will go to great lengths to find piles of dry guano, the remains of up to two hundred spraints, topped with a shiny new marker. Otter huntsmen were keen aficionados; they knew that otters returned to the same spots generation after generation. It is no surprise that these dropping piles were ideal for encouraging the hounds to pick up the scent. A huntsman would not be averse to a bit of scenting himself, squeezing the manure between his fingers to judge its age, along with a judicious sniff. Some hunters claimed similar nasal powers of identification to that of the otters themselves, announcing to the assembled hunt followers that they were on the trail of such and such an otter. You do wonder whether this was more about mystique than fact.

Kuschta became increasingly impatient as the new day wore on; night was a long time coming and she was hungry. In her temporary hide she pawed the ground for something to eat, but it was more of a distraction than a practical alternative – bugs and earthworms held little appeal. The previous night had been a hunting disaster; one small perch and an unlucky frog that she had stumbled across. As the sky started to darken she took her cue from the bats; if it was dark enough for them it was dark enough for her, so as soon as they began to flit across the blackening skyline, Kuschta was on the move. For days now she had been travelling ever upstream, keeping close to the river. Occasionally she had been driven inland by people, dogs or other otters, but essentially her path was that of the river bank. Sometimes she’d reach a confluence, the junction of the river offering a left or right choice with her taking the one seemingly least travelled.

Her progress was always halting, stopping to smell each spraint she came across, the new evidence to be considered before a decision could be made. Male or female was the first marker scent she’d evaluate. At first glance a male might spell bad news, but not necessarily so. A male otter will cover a huge territory, many times that of a female, so he expects to find a number of females within ‘his’ territory. On that basis she’d pose no surprise, interest or threat, being as yet still too young for mating. Females, on the other hand, were a different thing altogether. Though Kuschta offered no physical threat to a mother otter, who would be more than capable and willing of protecting herself and her pups, Kuschta would definitely be seen as taking a share of the neighbourhood food. It is interesting that otters moderate their reaction to competition for food very much according to the season. When times are good they are happy to share, and temporary visitors will be tolerated. When times are hard boundaries are, if not explicitly protected, to be more respected by an interloper.

The freshness or not of the spraint presented all sorts of conundrums; some good, some bad. If it was a fresh male mark, it signalled that he had been here and had moved on, and was unlikely to return for a few days. Stale? Well, he might be back sometime soon. Female spraints were different; lots of the same within close proximity told Kuschta that she was probably in the midst of a family territory – better to go. No female scents, or at least only ancient ones, were more complicated. Either she had stumbled across vacant territory, or maybe, if it was a productive area, the female was going through the secretive phase that bitches are apt to experience immediately before and after the birth of a litter, as they stop sprainting for a while. They change their normal behaviour to disguise their presence for the safety of the pups, which have to be left alone for a few hours each day whilst the mother hunts. Surprisingly, during this period the greatest threat to the litter comes not from other species but from otters themselves. Postmortems of roadkill dog otters regularly produce the remains of pups in the stomach. Now whether this is more often the father or another jealous male, nobody is entirely sure, but it surely happens and in all probability, as indicated by DNA matches, it is a bit of both. The fact is, this infanticide happens more often than we might like to believe. The reasons? Again, we don’t really know, but one can best assume that the mothers would not have evolved such a protection strategy without good cause. For otters the genesis of single parenting may have many reasons.

But spraints are more than just markers of territory; they are, in twenty-first-century jargon, food management tools, used by otters in all sorts of ways. Firstly, the spraint can say ‘I’ve just fished this pool, so give it some time to recover or we’ll kill the goose that lays the golden eggs’. Or secondly ‘Don’t waste your time and effort. I’ve caught all there is to catch’. Conversely, a pile of spraints, the most recent a little old, tells the otter that historically this is a productive spot now ripe for hunting. And no spraints either mark virgin or barren territory – proceed as you choose. Likewise, the contents of the spraint, be it the remains of fish, eel, crayfish and so on, tell of what there was, and maybe there still is, to eat. Kuschta was still a few months off appreciating the final piece in this spraintology jigsaw, which tells of females ready to mate and males on the prowl. Her time for this would come soon enough; for now she was struggling to find that elusive home territory.

If you sat an otter down to discuss the whys and wherefores of territory, the first words out of its mouth would most likely be ‘It’s complicated’; for Kuschta and her kind the enforced itinerant months were a progression from ignorance to understanding. When she was young the home patch that her mother had carved out was uniquely theirs; as far as she was concerned, the otter world did not extend beyond her immediate family. If other otters, including her father, strayed close, her mother would ward them off long before they could approach the pups. But now, on the road, she had to negotiate her way through a competing world.

To the human eye it is nigh on impossible to tell where the territory of one otter starts and another ends. There are no clear dividing lines; otters are certainly no respecters of man-made boundaries and there is little in nature that will hinder their progress. Otters are legendary for the ability to cover enormous distances in a single night; twenty miles is well within the scope of most, but herein lies the problem – that twenty miles is along a river, inevitably passing through a multiplicity of other territories that rightfully belong to other otters. But our mustelids have created a social policy that some humans could do well to learn from. At the core is the family territory, which is sacrosanct. It is always accepted that other otters will ‘pass through’, but woe betide any that pause or, worse still, try to stay. There is no excuse for ignorance; those spraints are flags enough to say who lives where and why. Single female otters, on the other hand, are more relaxed; after all, they don’t have pups to feed or defend so their territories are looser, overlapping at the edges. That said, they will have carved out a portion of the territory that they regard as ‘theirs’, expecting other otters to keep away. Males spread themselves much wider, their territory taking in maybe three, four or five females’ homelands, which they continually traverse, taking as much as a week to cover the entire area. Of course, this assumes there is only one dog otter in any given super-territory. But nature would not allow that – replacements and competition are always required. There will be more than one male sharing the territory, a potentially ruinous situation with competition for land, females and food. But otters have evolved a daisy-chain hierarchy where each lesser male follows in the footsteps of his immediately superior male, organising his life so he precisely avoids meeting the others. Of course, there are clashes, violent fights and changes in the order. No otter chooses to be of lower caste, but, given a death or some other departure, there will be a shuffling of the pack.

It is a fascinating animal culture; despite being solitary creatures, otters as a breed have survived for 20 million years because, probably without realising it, they look out for each other. Avoidance saves wasteful territorial disputes. Designated family homelands allow pups to thrive. Complicated spraint markings spread out the population, avoiding overcrowding, preserving food stocks and limiting disease. Wandering males mix up the gene pool. For the perfect evolution you could not write a much better script – it is just a shame, as we will see later, that humans came into the midst of this with near-fatal consequences.

CHAPTER 2

A PLACE TO CALL HOME

Winter

As far as the weather is concerned, otters don’t worry unduly about the seasons; they are perfectly adapted to anything the British climate might throw at them, unlike, say, their tiny, semi-aquatic, fellow river dwellers the water voles, which are easily wiped out by a spell of damp weather, floods or the sudden arrival of a predator. Being at the top of the food chain helps, but, more importantly than that, the otter frame is honed for survival. You might have thought that, for an animal constantly in and out of the water, blubber was the key to insulation, like, say, a seal, but otters carry just 3 per cent of their body weight in fat. In seals it is more like 25 per cent, which is close to that of the human body. So what is it that keeps otters warm and dry?

A clue lies in the luxuriant fur which the otter, when not swimming or sleeping, is frequently grooming. To start with, otters generally look close to black when wet, but actually, when dry, their fur is more of a brown colour and incredibly soft to the touch. Kuschta’s Californian sea otter cousins have the densest fur of any animal on the planet, at 140,000 hairs per square centimetre. On its own, that figure doesn’t mean much, but when you reckon that the arctic fox, one of the most durable survivors of polar winters where the temperature may drop to as low as -20°C (-4°F), has fur with a mere 20,000 density, then the British otter, even though it trails the sea breed at 80,000, has a pelt for life. If you are wondering about us, a density of 300 on the human scalp tells you everything about the importance of hats.

Kuschta’s fur, like that of a polar bear and other mammals which are constantly immersing, is dual-layered. The top layer consists of outer guard hairs, which are thick and long and form a partial barrier to keep the fur beneath dry. As she climbs out of the water, Kuschta’s pelt will look anything other than smooth and sleek, but rather spiky, the coat almost like that of a hedgehog. This is because the hairs combine in little arrows to draw and drain the water off the body. But it is the underneath, the under-fur, the really dense stuff, where the otter is so truly well adapted for life in a river. Regardless of any density quotient, the ultimate test of the under-fur is that in whatever direction you stroke or pull at the half-inch hairs, you will not see the skin below.

However, the fur alone is not enough to insulate the otter. It takes one other crucial component, namely air, which, once trapped between the hairs, keeps out the cold – a sort of mammalian double-glazing – hair, air and then more hair. Grooming is, of course, about drying out and keeping clean, but it is equally for puffing up the under-fur to let air back in. And it’s a lot of air. To track an otter swimming underwater, watch out for a tell-tale line of air bubbles rising to the surface – wherever the otter goes, the bubbles will follow. For otter hunters it was a tracking gift from heaven and something the otter cannot avoid, for the bubbles are not created by breathing but by the pressure of the water gradually squeezing the air from the pelt. And because of this there is a definite time limit as to how long an otter can spend in water. After about half an hour the air has gone and both layers of fur are completely sodden, the cold water pressing against the skin, sucking heat from the unprotected body. Again, otter hunters knew this. If they could keep the otter immersed for long enough, regardless of how many times it surfaced for air (they can hold their breath for up to four minutes but rarely do so for more than 30 seconds), hypothermia would set in, hastening the end. Conversely, in the heat of a summer day, lounging on her couch, Kuschta would be content to leave her damp pelt well alone, the slowly dissipating air allowing her to keep cool, her coat fluffing and lightening to a more roan brown the longer she lay.