The Otters’ Tale

All in all, this is otter heaven; when on land, there is no point at which an otter is ever more than a few bounds from the safety of water, and they do treat the respective streams as regular highways. I can see from the permanent tracks in the grass and the slides that they arrive via one stream, cross by land to another, tracking back to the original one further downstream by a different route. They barely deviate in the routes they follow; in the spring the fresh grass is pressed down, by summer it is pounded brown and in winter there is muddy track. And then, of course, there is the snow. They are, if nothing else, creatures of habit.

The mill is also on the edge of two of the Wallop villages that stand along the brook, our building being the first or last outpost, depending on your direction of travel. The two settlements, Over Wallop and Nether Wallop, like the territory of otters, are very linear. The ancient meaning of the word ‘wallop’ is hidden valley, and the combined villages stretch about three miles, the homes of just a few hundred people mostly hunched up close to the course of the river. I suspect that the mill wheel, the last stop after all those miles of habitation, is where otters can arrive and depart by water, almost like a proper holt, which must seem like a blessed refuge. Conversely, if they arrive from the direction of The Badlands (more about this place in a moment), after a trek over four or five miles of wild and barely habited river, the stopover with us must appeal for different, but equally important, reasons.

The one thing I haven’t mentioned is the trout lake, which for all the obvious reasons makes us an undoubted attraction on the itinerary of any otter. The lake, which lies just 35 yards to the west of the mill (to the left of that imaginary rugby ball) is fed by offshoots of the Wallop Brook that flow in at the top and out at the bottom. It is the shape of a kidney, which size-wise would more or less fit into a football field. There are grilles at the inflow and outflow to stop the trout escaping, but it is otherwise unprotected, just part of the landscape. But this is not really your normal lake. It is stuffed full of rainbow trout, because this is where I teach fly fishing – with new people coming every day you need a heavy density of fish, and during the season, April to October, the stock is replenished fortnightly from a local trout hatchery. I don’t like to diminish the status of the rainbows; they are hard-fighting fish that are great to catch and in their native North America they are wily survivors, but here, when the fishermen have gone home and the night falls, the odds are stacked against them when the otters come calling.

During the spring and summer when I go out to do my early morning rounds, clearing the sluices and adjusting the hatches in preparation for the fishing day ahead, I expect to find a fish corpse, or the evidence of one being caught, more or less every other day. Usually it is a victim of an otter, though occasionally it is a heron, but it is pretty easy to tell the difference. If it is an almost whole fish, the heron will have left tell-tale stab wounds. Conversely, if the bird has had time to eat pretty much all the fish, it will look more like a cartoon fish skeleton, the left-behind bones picked clean. Otters, on the other hand, generally start from the head down, eating everything, bones and all, as they go. In the depth of winter, when food is scarce, it is unusual to find part-eaten trout – protein is too scarce. It is only really in the summer, or when the mother is teaching the pups to fish, that otters abandon a trout without finishing it off. Sometimes I have to look really hard to see whether they have been, the only evidence those few flecks of blood or bright scales similar to what I saw on that snowy morning. I suspect the otters had been robbing me blind of trout for years without me ever knowing it.

As winter clutched at the throat of the countryside, daily squeezing every last drop of life from the less hardy inhabitants, Kuschta took to exploring her new territory. Unfettered by the constraints of other otters, she was free to move at will, marking the land along the Wallop Brook from the junction pool to the headwaters, where it is barely a river at all as the bright crystal water springs from the ground. If you flew up the valley like a bird you’d see that, despite all the apparent habitation – houses, farms, roads and all the other things that civilisation brings in its wake – the Wallop Valley is surprisingly wild. Woodland crowds up to the bank for at least a quarter of its length, hiding the river from prying eyes. Water meadows, rough-grazed by cattle and flecked with wild flowers, merge the land with the water. In some places it is just a river lost in a wetland swamp. We call this lost place downstream of the Mill The Badlands, where reed beds, crisscrossing rivulets, soft soggy ground and a scruffy, fallen willow plantation look like a terrific mess. It is rarely visited by people. Sure, there are some tidy gardens that come up to the edge of the brook in places, bits that have been adapted for things like my mill or banks that have been realigned to prevent flooding, but on the whole it is a natural stream that hasn’t changed much in the past two or three centuries.

When we think about the history of our landscape, it is strange that otters don’t feature more in British folklore, history and culture, for they have been part of our lives since the first moment man made settlements on the banks of a river. From that time onwards, as we invaded the territory that they had called their own for millions of years, otters were amongst us but never really part of us – mysterious creatures that we saw rarely and understood even less. The inns along the highways of Britain are testament to this absence; the names The White Hart, The Black Horse, The Bear, The Swan, The Bull and even The Black Rat offer an insight to the creatures that have impinged on our culture down the centuries. But The Otter Inn? Well, there are some, but very few considering it is our largest semi-aquatic mammal.

The more you think about it, the stranger it is. After all, otters are not exactly small; nose to tail they are close to four feet long. A fully grown male weighs around twenty-two pounds – that is heavier than a terrier or about the same as a beagle. In feline terms, think twice the weight of a healthy cat and twice the body length. And a river through a town is a much-watched place – you’d think they would hardly go unnoticed, plus you’d expect that the numerous opportunities for food would draw them into human orbit. Rats and foxes have adapted to human habitation, thriving on our detritus and finding homes that man has, by accident rather than design, created for them. But not otters. They seem to shun the opportunities afforded by man, even changing their habits to become yet more secretive.

We think of otters as nocturnal, but they can equally be diurnal – active by day instead of night. On the south and west coast of Ireland otters regularly swim past anglers during the day; visitors are astonished, whilst for the locals it is so common as to pass unremarked. It is the same in the Scottish Isles, suggesting that where people are sparse otters are content to alter their behaviour accordingly. When they choose the night, they do it to avoid their greatest adversary – man.

Maybe there was a time long, long ago when man and otter lived in perfect harmony. After all, nobody ever seems to suggest that otters make good eating. They were not hunted for food, unlike the slow-witted beaver who, also native and incredibly populous to Britain at one time, was hunted to extinction as soon as early man took to living in the river valleys. In fact, the only people who seemed regularly to eat European otters was a group of Carthusian monks in Dijon, France, who stretched the truth to get around some awkward theological dietary requirements. Banned by holy order from consuming meat, they cunningly deemed the otter to be a fish. Now whether this was because it ate fish or lived like a fish, nobody is exactly sure, but accounts of the time rated the flesh ‘rank and fishy’, so the monks must have been somewhat desperate.

So aside from a few monks, maybe there was a time when the otter went about its daily life without a care in the world. A time when the fish were plentiful and the people few, when otters were free to range over huge tracts of unsettled land where the rivers were wild and the woodland dense. A time when otters feared nobody and wanted for nothing. It is a lovely thought; a sort of aquatic Garden of Eden. But if such a time ever existed it most certainly came to an end in the Middle Ages, when the population of Europe increased. Communities coalesced around rivers, the fertile valleys were gradually cleared and drained for agriculture. What was done a thousand or fifteen hundred years ago across southern England was not so very different to what is being done to the rainforests of South America today. The destruction of a habitat that slowly marginalises the indigenous species. Some will survive this change, others will become extinct. A few will become mortal enemies of man; unwelcome at best, feared at worst. The history of medieval times tells us that the otter fell into the ‘unwelcome’ category, labelled as the ‘fish-killer’, stealing food from the rivers that ‘rightfully’ belonged to the more ‘deserving’ mankind. It is a tag that remains today, but the persecution dates back many centuries.

The more you look back, the more astonishing it is that otters have avoided extinction in the British Isles. We might think of the eradication of a species as a rather modern manifestation of human behaviour, but otters have been on the hit list for over a thousand years. Way back in the twelfth century society went to war with the otters and lutracide was born. Henry II appointed the wonderfully titled King’s Otterer, who was charged with the extermination of the species. It was no passing fad; this was serious business. With the title came a manor house, land and an annual stipend all bundled up in legislation to create the Otterer’s Fee. The first Otterer, a man called Roger Follo, from his ‘Fee’ in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, went about his task with a new form of otter control, namely an otter-hound pack.

However innovative and hard-working the Honourable Follo might have been, any success must have been transitory, for by the fifteenth century Henry VI was back at it again with the creation of the Valet of our Otter-Hounds. But otters continued on their merry way until 1566, when, frustrated by their continued existence, Parliament passed the Acte for the Preservation of Grayne, which classified otters, along with badgers, foxes, hedgehogs1 and others, as vermin, allowing parish councils to offer bounties for their capture. Sixpence, the reward for a dead otter in the early 1600s, strikes me as a lot of money and gives some indication of how otters had become a significant public enemy.

It is interesting to ask why otters were elevated to this status. I think we can say with some degree of certainty that their fate as public mammal enemy number one was cast for the next three centuries in 1653 when Izaak Walton wrote about them in The Compleat Angler – a huge bestseller when it was first published and subsequently one of the most reprinted books of all time. He declared,

‘I am, Sir, a Brother of the Angle, and therefore an enemy of the Otter; for I hate them perfectly, because they love fish so well.’

This is pretty stern stuff for an animal that carried no disease, kept clear of people and posed no physical danger. But the fact is that otters were eating the fish owned by those who held the reins of power: the monarchy, noblemen, the church and the educated. These were singularly bad groups to antagonise. Noblemen owned the rights to fish rivers, which was an important source of income and food. Fishing grounds were jealously guarded – not just physically but in law, for they were specifically mentioned in the Magna Carta. The draconian law that went as far as capital punishment was enough to keep the commoners at bay, but otters required something else. Monasteries and the palaces of bishops had for centuries reared fish in ponds, but they were difficult to protect and made tempting pickings for a hungry otter in the depths of winter. Then people such as Walton discovered the joys of angling as a pastime, which pretty well sealed the public perception of the otter. Whether they truly posed a threat to fish stocks is debatable, but the fact remained that otters had got on the wrong side of the wrong people.

So the notion of the otter as a quarry became entrenched in the psyche of the nation; along with foxes and deer, the hunting of these animals with hounds was an accepted pastime. It was both part of the social fabric of the British Isles and a requirement for the management of the countryside, albeit the latter of dubious value. You’d have thought that as feudalism gave way to industrialisation society would lose interest in the otter, but not a bit of it. In the Victorian era, otter hunting became quite the fashionable pursuit, reaching its zenith in the years between the two World Wars. However, for all its barbarism, twentieth-century hunting barely put a dent in the otter population. Ironically, it was the hunts, with fewer otters to hunt, who first alerted a wider public to the decline in their numbers across post-war Britain, as over two decades – the 1950s and 60s – otters all but vanished from the countryside. Hovering on the brink of extinction, the search was on for the otters’ insidious foe before it was too late.

What has changed over the past half century in our country is the otter population. Wind back the clock eighty years ago or more and it is a fair bet that Kuschta would have faced fierce competition along the Wallop Brook, with probably just two or three miles to call her own compared to the nine miles over which she ranges today. The truth is that otters are just clawing their way back from the edge of extinction.

It really was a mighty achievement of twentieth-century man to bring otters to this sorry point in time, where their very existence was threatened. After all, we have succeeded where centuries of persecution have failed, but we did it entirely by accident, and then in recognising the ongoing damage we failed over successive decades to put it right. It will be of no comfort to know that we were not alone in this. Across Europe – in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Finland, Sweden – and in fact in just about every mainland country, we have seen a catastrophic decline in the population of otters in the post-war era. A culture of persecution continued to play a part; in Switzerland there were 40–60 otters left when given protection in 1952. By 1960 they were all gone. To give you some idea of the level of hatred, three captive otters in Zurich Zoo were killed by visitors. But ultimately it was a poison, spread in the name of progress, that took otters to the brink.

Seven decades on from the end of the Second World War, it is hard fully to understand the mind-set of a Britain traumatised by a conflict that had kept the nation on the brink of imminent starvation. What we would now call food security, the ability to feed the population with crops grown on home soil, was the mantra of all governments of all hues in the years immediately after the war right through to the 1970s. As the Minister for Agriculture, you would have been one of the top five men in the cabinet; today you would be an also ran. The National Farmers Union held sway at every level of decision making in the drive to boost food production. The BBC joined in, The Archers a handy propaganda tool for agricultural lobbying. What was good for farming was good for the nation. Where nature stood in the way of progress, science was enlisted, the upsides lauded and the downsides ignored. Intensive agriculture, the please-all, cure-all of the time, required chemical intervention, and so it arrived in 1955.

It was the simplest of desires that caused the first problems; the wish to protect newly sown corn from pests for better germination rates. Coated with an organochlorine pesticide, the effects were almost instant – wheat and barley thrived, bringing marginal arable land into production and boosting yields. The trouble is, fields don’t exist in a vacuum. Wood pigeons and songbirds eagerly scratch out the newly planted seed from the ground, consuming it in quantity. They were the first to die, killed by direct ingestion. Next up were the species that died from eating the dead. Foxes and barn owls were hit hard, but it was the dramatic decline of the peregrine population that sounded alarm bells in 1956. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) started to investigate the avian deaths, fingers were pointed but there was unstoppable momentum behind the use of organochlorines.

They were used in a multiplicity of ways that spread them into nature’s food chain: sheep dips, bulb dressing, orchard sprays, timber preservative, moth-proofing fabrics and carpet-making, to pick a few. It might seem a long step from those processes to killing a top predator like an otter, but when you consider, for instance, that great rug weavers like Wilton built their factories by rivers for water and for waste disposal in an era when environmental legislation was all but non-existent, then the connection comes into focus. So, as the invisible fingers of pollution touched just about every river (sheep dips were particularly pernicious in this respect), the problem turned into the unknown crisis, with nobody really noticing through a combination of bad luck, the secret nature of the otter life, the delayed effect of the poison and inaction. The bad luck came in the form of a report published in 1957 but based on data from 1952. Why there was a five-year delay I have no idea (though conspiracy theorists might), but it concluded that the otter population was doing fine. With the birds to worry about, nobody gave much more thought to otters and, being such secret animals, few had any real idea what was happening to the population as the insidious chemicals did their worst. This is how it happened.

Being top of the food chain is all very well, but the implication is that you prey upon everything below you. That’s fine just so long as your favourite foods – eels and fish, in the case of otters – are good to eat. By the early 1960s this was far from being the case. Eels, which live for 10–20 years in ponds, were absorbing the organochlorines into their bodies at a rate of knots from a diet of similarly affected grubs, earthworms and insects. The same thing was happening with fish from their diet of invertebrates: nymphs, snails and all those other bugs you find in a river. But the chemical pass-the-parcel wasn’t killing outright the otters or the things they ate. There were no corpses littering the river bank – if there were, things might have turned out differently. No, otters were hit hard because, with little body fat to act as a buffer like, say, in the eels, the sub-lethal poisoning went straight to the reproduction organs, slowly rendering the population infertile. Otters were not dying, they were dying out.

It is a hard case to make from an emotional standpoint, but it was otter hunts that were the greatest guardians of Lutra lutra during this time. They had a vested interest, that was true, but nobody was closer to the lives of the otter. It is counter-intuitive, I know, but when it came to habitat protection and preventing uncontrolled extermination, the hunts were the otters’ best friend. One hunt in Dumfriesshire even went to the lengths of importing otters from Norway for reintroduction into the wild after a localised population crash. By the early 1960s the declining population was more than just a local occurrence; packs up and down the country were reporting fewer and fewer otters. Some packs closed down. Others hunted mink instead. The remainder changed their method of hunting, reducing the kills from 50 per cent of all otters chased to 15 per cent, limiting, as far as it was possible, those kills to old or sick otters. By the time otter hunting was finally banned as part of an Act of Parliament that gave the animals protected status in 1978, the fifteen otter packs that remained were killing just 150 otters a year between them.

The threat of extinction was never just from hunting, but as the news of the otter decline filtered through to the wider population during the 60s and early 70s this was what took the brunt of the blame, as the anti-hunting lobby gained a voice. Other voices called for investigations, and reports were duly produced. Water quality, habitat destruction, disturbance through human activity and even the lowly mink were the four reasons generally cited for the decline of otters, but rarely was the systemic poisoning given the prominence we now know it deserved.

However much it was wrong, it was hardly surprising that mink took part of the rap; a non-native species first imported in the 1920s, it had adapted to life in Britain pretty well, the population gradually expanding over time, with regular boosts from escapees from mink farms. The European mink, Mustela lutreola, are, as the second half of their Latin name suggests, related to otters, part of the mustelid family. They are more gregarious than their larger cousin (they are about one-third of the size), and you are far more likely to see a mink than an otter as they are less wary of people, preferring to be out and about during the day. The mink were blamed because nature abhors a vacuum. As the otters disappeared, the mink expanded into the vacant space, people assuming that the mink, with a reputation for being vicious, had driven out the otters. Nothing could be further from the truth. Today, with otters in the ascendant, mink are finding themselves marginalised, and their population is declining.

Habitat destruction, mostly in the relentless process of urbanisation, will always be an issue for otters. Actually the worst of the damage was probably done in the 1940s and 50s when, again in the name of food production, vast swathes of otter-friendly wetlands were drained and thousands of miles of rivers straightened and dredged. Disturbance? Well, that was cited in the form of more leisure uses for rivers – boating, fishing, canoeing and so on – but otters are pretty tolerant of minor human incursions into their territory and no amount of daytime splashing would have had a significant effect. Water quality (aside from the organochlorines) was actually by this time going in the opposite direction, improving rather than worsening. The River Thames is often cited, reaching its polluted nadir in 1957 when classified as a ‘dead’ river, incapable of sustaining a fish population. Since then, along with most other rivers, the situation has improved, with salmon now regularly running up the capital’s river. Confusing? Well, only if you were directed, as most people were, to look in the wrong places. But for those close to the science, otter postmortem data was tightening the noose around the neck of organochlorines – the problem was that nobody in power was prepared to pull the lever that consigned them to death instead of the otters.

Finally, a report in 1968 that charted the catastrophic collapse in otter numbers captured the headlines, leading to a general acceptance, albeit grudgingly in certain circles, that organochlorines were the problem. However, vested interest and inaction delayed the widespread banning of their use until 1975. This you might think was a cause for dancing in the street, but they were simply replaced by the equally bad organophosphates the following year with, almost unbelievably, the original chemical continuing in use for commercial bulb farming in Cornwall and the compulsory practice of sheep dipping right through to 1992. In that same year, the authorities finally called time on organophosphates, replacing them with synthetic pyrethroids. Relief? Well, not really. The synthetic substitute, rather than infecting the food chain, went a step further by wiping out entire groups of invertebrates – so the very insects that fed the fish that fed the otters were disappearing. This new menace was finally banned in 2006.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if your head is spinning from all these dates and scientific terms, but I chart it because it is truly amazing that, despite fifty years of sustained attrition, albeit unintentional, otters are still with us today. As with everything to do with these secretive creatures, it is hard to pinpoint the exact moment when the population reached its lowest point, but most observers seem to agree that it was some time in the 1990s – by then it was estimated that otters were only present in a handful of English counties. In Wales, Scotland and Ireland, with less intensive agriculture, the numbers had held up better. But the long road to recovery, which continues to this day, had begun. It was never going to be a fast journey; the ‘organos’, with their various suffixes, have to dissipate gradually from the food chain. Otters are not the most prolific breeders at the best of times, their progress tied to the health of the rivers and the availability of food. Fortunately they hung on in enough places to keep a breeding population alive; the areas mostly away from agriculture and industry. And that otter society requirement for the juveniles to travel great distances to find new, unoccupied territories had started to disperse a new population nationwide.