Otter III: on the hunt

[After this blog I’ll be in South Carolina for 3 weeks, so the blog will take a break. Maybe I will find a story down there to bring you on my return.]

I thought I was done with otters, but no. Three weeks after my previous encounters, I saw him again. My first glimpse was a small movement of a tiny dark sliver of its head behind a snowbank, near the same air hole it had used before. Pure luck that I was looking in that direction. The top of the head is more or less in the centre of the photo below:

When I moved to higher ground to see over the snowbank, lo and behold it had caught a fish.

My friendly local expert, Ed Poliquin, says it was probably a perch or a sucker. The otter munched:

swallowed:

Looked straight at me in a toothy sort of way:

cast a baleful place at me over his shoulder

and went back in the water.

P.S. I keep calling him ”him”, since he is not able to tell me his preferred pronouns, but it is entirely possible that he is a she. This is the time of year when these otters start to give birth, and she did look rather fat in the one photo I got of her rolling on her back… If that were the case, she would soon disappear for a while, and then reappear in a couple of months with from one to five babies.. You will be the first to know.

P.P.S. A week or so before this, I saw fish jumping out of the water in a tiny patch that wasn’t iced in, and then suddenly something big broke the surface, the water boiled, and the fish went berserk

I have no idea what it was, but I suspect it was an otter hunting under the ice. I waited to see if something might emerge with a fish in its mouth, but no such luck.

Or of course it might have been the Loch Sabattus monster… or a great white shark.