Otters in town

What a busy week we’ve had and I’m not just talking about more visitors to the Centre either!

The Barn Owl chicks are doing well, their appetites are good and we’ve managed not to imprint them at all. Every time we approach them they hiss and click away at us, both very healthy signs that they didn’t trust us one bit.

By the middle of last week they both looked likely to fledge, all their down had gone and they looked great in their newly grown feathers so we opened the door to the outside world for them. They spent four or five days just taking in the view but this morning their supper from last night was untouched and the birds had gone. I don’t think they will be very far away and we’ll continue to leave food out for them for a while to give them support while they hopefully learn to hunt for themselves.

Back to otters now and last Sunday afternoon (everything seems to happen on Sundays recently) we received a number of telephone calls saying that there was a distressed otter cub in a drain by a river bridge in the centre of Launceston. We went to investigate and found a group of people watching a small cub that was hiding in a storm drain; they were just a few yards from a busy, noisy main road. It was 3pm on a very sunny afternoon and not the sort of time or place you’d expect to find such a shy animal.

Apparently an otter and possibly two cubs had been attacked by a group of ducks protecting ducklings, the three had become separated and one of the cubs had taken refuge in the drain. The hunter had become the hunted!! The bad news was that people who had seen the cub up close thought it had at least two injuries that might need medical treatment.

We caught the frightened little thing without too much trouble and took her back to the Centre so we could have a proper look at her. She was about five weeks old and once we had cleaned her up her “injuries” turned out to be nothing more than grease, probably from the inside of the drain. We fed her and then Mandy and I assessed the situation: we had a healthy cub and we knew exactly where it had been found. We suspected that its mum would stay around searching for her cub for at least a few hours so should we try to get them back together?

We knew that time was against us and that if we were going to find mum we had to do it as soon as possible so off we went with the cub in a small cage in the back of the van whistling for its mum the entire journey. It was just after 5pm. First we tried an area slightly down river of the bridge as that was where mum had been last seen. I whistled, the kids whistled and even Mandy whistled but we just couldn’t get the cub to call at all. Typical.

Then we tried near the bridge where she had been found. I just opened the back of the van and whistled for a minute or two and then, was that a reply? The cub thought so because she suddenly started to call at the top of her tiny voice! There were only a few people around and we didn’t want to attract any attention so I surreptitiously took the cage and placed it under the river bank where it would be hard to see from the road. The cub was still calling but I didn’t want to let it go until we were sure that mum was nearby, it might not be so easy to catch a second time. There was definitely an otter coming closer, we couldn’t see it but the calls were getting louder and louder.

When I was sure that mum was only a few metres away I took the cub from the cage and waded with her to an island in the middle of the river. I set it down in good cover and retreated. Five minutes passed and I didn’t see the next bit, but a lady standing in her garden did; she beckoned me over and said she had been watching our activities (so much for being secretive) and had just seen two otters, one a cub, together not far from where I had set her down. I watched the area with her and soon we saw them together in the shallows moving towards an area of dense cover. We then left them alone.

First thing the next morning Mandy and I went back to the river and had a good look around. We found a couch or resting place in deep cover where the otters had spent some time and then moved on. We were pretty sure that they had left the area the way they had arrived; as a family.

Chuffed to bits? You bet we were.