Episode 42
Copyright © John Page Williams, Jr. all rights reserved.
This is John Page Williams with another reading from Chesapeake Almanac. The month is February and this chapter is named "Otters Are Busy Now."
Dave and Pat Carpenter own the Poquoson Marina, down below Yorktown near the mouth of the Poquoson River. It's a big marina, and icy winters mean trouble for boats and pilings. But Dave and Pat like ice, because they can watch the otters play on it. The animals seem to spend more time around the marina then, or maybe they just show themselves more in the daytime. They fish around the pilings and appear to delight in sliding across the ice.
The Chesapeake has a healthy population of otters. In fact, the river otter is widely distributed in North America, except for the most Arctic sections of Alaska and Canada and the extreme parts of the southwest United States. On the Chesapeake, every river system has at least one family, from the hardwood swamp streams of the upper Potomac and the Presqu'ile National Wildlife Refuge on the James to the river shores and marshes of the York and the Gunpowder and the Bayshore marshes of Tangier Sound.
Otters may be widely distributed, but there are not a lot of them. They're carnivores, feeding at the top of the food web, and there's simply not as much for them to eat as there is for herbivores like muskrats or for opportunistic omnivores like raccoons and possums. So like their kin, the other species of otters around the world and minks and weasels, river otters are secretive, elusive creatures that hunt large territories. Depending on where they live, otters will mark out five miles of stream bank or 50 miles of coastal marsh and beach. Working a large area ensures that no part of it will become overfished, and an animal constantly on the move is likely to stay out of the way of potential enemies.
The river otter is smaller than the well-publicized and endangered cousin, the sea otter of the Pacific Coast. Males grow to about four feet in length, two-thirds of that being head and body and one-third tail. Maximum weight is about 25 pounds (as opposed to 80 pounds for the sea otter). Females are slightly smaller.
The animal's feet are webbed, with hair on the soles. The coat is rich brown, with long, glossy guard hairs over thick fur. The belly is lighter in color, and the hair about the face is gray. The animal is well equipped for life even in the coldest weather.
The otter's body is long and sleek, with a flat head and muzzle. In the water, where it counts most, the animal is well streamlined. It swims with its forelegs tucked against its chest, oscillating the after part of its body from side to side and steering with its thick, muscular tail. Often the hind legs are tucked up against the body, but the animal can use them for extra bursts of speed. The otter's backbone appears to be particularly flexible, allowing for extraordinary maneuverability either at play or in the serious business of fishing.
Otters eat a variety of food, with diet depending on habitat. They eat primarily fish and shellfish, but will also eat young muskrats, birds, and frogs. In Britain, they've long been despised and hunted as destroyers of trout and salmon, as any reader of Isaac Walton's Complete Angler knows. But like trout and salmon, the predatory fish that live in the Bay are fast, agile, and hard to catch, and so make up only a minor part of the otters' diet. Wild creatures must expend energy to catch food, and if they expend more calories in the catching than they take in in the eating, they starve. The net amount of energy gained is what counts to them. Hence, it pays otters to concentrate on food that is relatively easy to catch.
On the Chesapeake, this means small inshore species like killifish, juvenile spot, and mullet in the lower Bay, although they have been known to catch fish as large as carp in some of the tributaries. One soft-crabber on Virginia's Northern Neck reports that otters visit his peeler traps regularly, looking for the fish that swim into them. When this happens, he finds a fish head left on the top of a trap. Only when the traps have no fish will the otter take a crab. Generally a ripe peeler and/or a soft crab.
Otters appear to mate for life, and they usually breed later in the winter, though some breeding takes place in every month of the year. Young are born in every month of the year also, but there is survival advantage in having them born in the spring, with summer's warm temperatures and more abundant food to aid in their slow development. To this end, a bitch otter bred in the summer or fall is able to hold the fertilized egg until late winter before it attaches itself to the wall of her uterus and the embryo begins to develop. This remarkable process, rare but not unique to otters, is called delayed implantation. The young, one to five in a litter, stay with their mother for about a year. The dog otter stays away when the cubs are newly born, but there is evidence he takes part in their rearing later in the year.
The dog maintains a large territory while the bitch and young hold a smaller one within it. They hunt parts of the territory each night, moving on to other parts the next night. Somewhere in each territory, though, there is a well-hidden den, usually in a dense thicket. The animals are wanderers but they are also creatures of habit. They use the same trails over and over.
Early morning is good time to see otters, but the best way to begin is to look for signs and trails first. On a firm beach, tracks can be useful. The animal leaves its peculiar, stretched-out track pattern as it lopes along (the result of its distinct body shape). But the most reliable signs are piles of scat, or droppings, especially fish scales and bones. (Otters eat their fish whole and somehow manage to pass the scales and bones without giving themselves ulcers.)
Otters have anal scent glands that they use with droppings to mark their territories, and the scents may vary enough to be useful to them in recognition of each other. Thus the places where they drop their scats become important parts of their territories. In these places and along their trails, they will also tear up and leave piles of vegetation which they have marked with scent.
A few otters have been partially domesticated. They've received a lot of publicity, especially in Britain, in Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water and Philip Wayre's The River People. But both Maxwell and Wayre are careful to point out the difficulties and dangers of keeping them. Otters are wild, and that is part of their appeal. They are perhaps the wildest, most elusive and secretive mammals on the Chesapeake. They certainly see more of us than we do of them. Watching them play on the ice in February is one of the year's best thrills.
For more happenings around the Bay in February see our other Chesapeake Almanac podcasts and read our blog posts "Skunk Cabbage are the Bay's Bouqet" and "Great Blue Herons Prepare for Spring in February."
