By John Knox
I have finally seen my neighbourhood otter. There he was, popping his head up in Duddingston Loch and then diving again with a swoop of his smooth back and long tail.
It was mid-afternoon, on a cloudy day, and I had just arrived in the hide on the south side of the loch. “Do you want to see an otter?” the man with the telescope asked me excitedly. I looked though but could see nothing except the dark surface of the water and the reeds on the shore opposite. “Try again,” said the man, “he comes up for air every so often.”
Sure enough, a moment later my otter appeared, head up, looking around – and then, with a speed and elegance you don’t expect, he plopped down into the water again and was gone in a circle of bubbles.
It was a moment of pure magic. Life on this planet suddenly took a turn for the better. My heart jumped. I don’t suppose the otter cared a splash what pleasure he had brought to us humans in the hide – even if he knew we were watching him from 300 metres away. But this rare interchange between man and beast reminded me of what Burns called our “social union”. It reminded me too of Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water, the very human story of how he saved an Iraqi otter and reared it on an island off the Kyle of Lochalsh.
Apparently there are only 8,000 otters in the whole of Scotland and freshwater otters are usually nocturnal, so I was so lucky to see one – especially here in the middle of Edinburgh. Scotland is home to most of Britain’s otters and we have one of the most important populations left in Europe. Happily, numbers are on the rise again after 40 years of decline due to urbanisation and chemical-based agriculture.
Curiously, one of the main threats to the otter is the motor car. Despite their agility and quickwittedness, otters are notoriously bad at crossing the road. Like hedgehogs, they get confused by the headlights as they scurry about at night between river systems. Otters can range for up to 16km in a single night. Perhaps this is why most of them live in the Highlands and why there is a healthy population of sea otters around our remote northern coastline.
In a recent online opinion poll for Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), 84 per cent of people said they would like to see otters in all of Scotland’s rivers. The other 16 per cent are presumably anglers worrying about their supplies of trout and salmon. Or they may be frog lovers, because frogs are what otters eat when the trout and salmon and eels run out.
But the anglers need not worry. Otters are pretty few and far between. A typical family has a range of about 30km and they only have two or three cubs in a season. Another surprising fact is that otters only live for three or four years – so the population is vulnerable to a few bad breeding seasons. This is why they are highly protected by law: it is an offence to kill or capture an otter or to disturb their holts (burrows) or couches (nests).
Unsurprisingly, the SNH opinion survey found that most people – well over 80 per cent – want to protect our wildlife, whether furry or feathered. But more interesting was the order in which people ranked their environmental wish-list. First came clean waters around our coast, then litter-free beaches. At number three was well maintained parks, then wild salmon – and, at number five, an end to the persecution of birds of prey. My friendly otter did not make into the top end of the list at all. But prioritising is never an easy business, particularly when everything in the environment is connected to everything else.
Indeed, this is my point. That fleeting moment when the otter popped his head out of the water at Duddingston Loch was one of those moments when you realise that we human beings live on the same spectrum as the animals and indeed the plants on our planet. We are part of the same continuum and there is no end to it. It is a ring of bright water.
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