You see otters on television, all right, skittering across lovely western beaches or nosing out food around nearby seaweedy rocks. Usually on films by Eamon de Buitlear. And an open beach is the perfect place to get a good look at them. It would be wearisome and often fruitless to try catch ing them with your lens in their normal inland haunts - along the banks of rivers.
But how often does the average person see this animal in the flesh? Even people who live on a riverside may never have caught a glimpse. Modern conditions, too, are hard on these lovely animals. Pollution may affect them directly, indirectly, too, as it reduces fish number and so the basic food of the otter.
Gerry Farrell, the great observer and benign watch man over the river Borora in Meath, was asked if he, who lives on its banks, thought the otters had gone from there. An anxious neighbour had found that the normal tracks up one side of a oxbow in the river and down the other side, usually marked on the down side by spraints or excrement, no longer bore the marks. Gerry was philosophical. They could just have changed their usual routes, he said. He hadn't seen any lately, but some time last year two creatures were playing in the water at the bottom of his garden and he was going for his gun, thinking they were mink. But, at second look, he saw they were otters.
There was a time when at Pearse Bridge over the Dodder on the road to Rathfarnham, you could see an otter basking on a big flat stone. The stone was removed in river widening. Maybe his descendants are lurking around somewhere in the reeds, coming out only at night. In England, the Otter Trust in Suffolk has released young otters to the number of 140 and report some success. Philip Wayre and his wife Jean, according to an article in The Countryman estimate that each pair needs about 20 miles of river bank. An angler friend says that in a life time of river walking here in Ireland, he has only twice seen otters, which doesn't mean they are not around.