Otter Encounters
ThalleonAdmin
05/04/2024
Those of us lucky enough to have spent time observing the secretive lives of our resident otters, hold it as a precious and very special experience.
Many people who spend a lot of time out and about on our shoreline never get to see them at all, or perhaps just fleeting sightings.
It may surprise many to hear that they are around and about daily and are often hidden in plain sight. It becomes much easier to spot and observe them once you become familiar with their habits, but it can involve considerable dedication.
For Pat and I it all started quite by chance, but we have been rewarded since then with multiple extended viewing sessions.
We bought a seafront plot in 2002, and then moved into a rental house close to the beach whilst we planned and built our “retirement” home.
Our weekdays then involved an early walk on the beach, a quick swim and shower, before heading off to the city.
After many months of this we were rewarded one morning, before sunrise with a good sighting of a lone fully grown adult otter crossing from the Buffelsriver mouth and heading out to sea.
Excited as we were by this, little did we know what Pringle Bay was to serve up not long into the future.
Our house was designed and built during 2003, complete with all the stress and drama these events always seem to create and we were in our home for Christmas.
Life then improved dramatically as we settled in to living in direct contact with the sea, the sight and sounds of oystercatchers, cormorants, and whales right on our doorstep.
We felt the anxiety of parent oystercatchers rearing chicks on a rock that was a popular spot for casual craw-fishermen, hiding junior for hours on end. But this is all a distraction from the purpose of my story.
In about August of our first year in the house and having had a couple of feral cats come to share our own cats’ dinner, we were woken in the night by the sounds of what we thought were cats fighting in the fynbos close to the house.
The sounds were not quite right but it was the only thing we could conclude. It turned out later that these were probably the sounds of amorous activities between an otter couple, as a few months later we quite by chance saw a couple of adults in the kelp beds directly in front of the house.
They were busy catching crawfish and taking each catch onto a secluded rock on the water’s edge. This continued for quite a while until a series of squeaks/whistles emerged from the bushes in front of us.
This turned out to be the mother’s pups calling for Mum to come and breastfeed them. Over the following weeks this happened more and more often, whilst I started finding hiding places in the rocks to observe them.
It wasn’t long before I decided I needed something better than my ‘point-n-shoot’ camera to try and record their presence, which led me down a dangerous money-spending trail of finding the best camera and lens combinations!
Eventually the litter was brought down to the water morning and evening, in the half-light, and taught to swim, dive, and eats scraps from the adults.
This then evolved into being given whole live crawfish on the rocks, for them to devour. By then we had realised that the family was living deep in the fynbos where fresh groundwater emerged and formed a small stream down to the sea.
We would often hear the pups squabbling with each other as they slept during the day. They would start rousing themselves in the evenings as the sun was setting, talking quietly amongst themselves. This was my signal to get into a hiding spot, camera in hand, where I could watch them emerge and make their way down to the sea.
They never moved off in a hurry, preferring to feed almost as soon as they hit the water, usually starting out with the easily picked soft-shelled limpets growing on the kelps’ stems as well as underwater rock faces, but ultimately would move off along the coast feeding on crawfish and smallish fish all the while.
Their ability to devour whole crawfish whilst afloat never ceases to amaze me, as they appear to use gravity to allow the chunks of flesh and carapace to reach their stomachs. Having their eyes only a few centimetres out of the water meant the children would lose sight of the rest of the family often, resulting in much calling out to each other.
This made keeping track of them much easier. As they moved away peace and quiet returned, until just before sunrise when they would return, emerge, and move as a group back into their holt, where the sounds of rinsing off in fresh water could be heard before they would settle down to sleep. The next evening the whole process would repeat itself.
With time the family would move away, returning occasionally for an overnight rest. For many years this repeated, not always with the same parents, although I could never really tell. I suspect that eventually it was a new generation of parents we would see, but never felt the desire to try identifying individuals.
Some of them, with significant injuries, were easy to identify, but generally they all had some marks from brushes with nature.
As our part of the country started experiencing dry summers, and our dam levels reached worrying levels, so too did the groundwater levels, and our little stream dried up.
There was no longer fresh water for the otters to drink and wash in, which is essential for their survival.
So, we no longer got to experience this annual treat. It looks like the groundwater has been recharged once again, as the stream is back.
We look forward to the sounds announcing the arrival of otter lovers, (the animals themselves, not the human kind), setting up home and blessing us with front row seats as a new family is introduced to the survival skills required to flourish in a hostile environment.
Many people don’t seem to realise that our otters are Cape Clawless Otters, Aonyx Capensis, is actually a freshwater mammal and only hunts and feeds in the sea. They require fresh water in their diet for survival.
They are not Sea Otters as such, although they are totally at home there. The young are unable to swim instinctively and need to be taught by their elders.
They excel at feeding in murky waters, using their long slender fingers to find their prey. I suspect that they prefer clearer water where crawfish and crabs are easily hunted down.
Peter – this is why we live here!
ThalleonAdmin