A safe haven in wild west Cork

Damien Enright meets with Foxes of a very different kind

IF you walk on two legs and your name is Fox, there seems to be no good reason why you shouldn’t call some of your four legged friends Ozzie, Billy or Pepe. If you have three otters in your back garden, and occasionally in your house, it’s hard to call them simply Otter 1, Otter 2 and Otter 3. While you don’t want to cosy up too much — so that when they’re reared or healed, whichever, they can be released into the wild and survive — naming them doesn’t change them.

Six otters have, to date, found sanctuary and care in the Foxes’ garden. There are three in residence. A fourth, Pepe, weaned on the bottle and released at eight months old, almost 11 years ago, still turns up every few months, perhaps for a free lunch or, sometimes, when it is unwell. It appears, standing on its hind legs on the window sill, whistling and clawing at the glass. Mike and June Fox let it in and feed it and, if necessary, give it antibiotics. Afterwards, off it goes again to the river that runs near their house at the end of a secluded lane in west Cork.

Three feet long, it is a formidable wild animal to have running around the kitchen.

All the animals in their care, past or present, were injured or maltreated in some way. Presently, there are the otters, a gaggle of geese and a small pond of ducks, two injured peregrine falcons, a hen harrier with one eye, and a barn owl, cage-bred and taken to primary schools by Mike, in order to demonstrate the beauty of the birds to young children.

The enclosures in their gardens are huge, and built at their personal expense. Each otter has a space as large as a double bedroom, complete with bedrock, logs, wild plants and trees. The individual bird aviaries are almost as large. The problem with grants is the requirement for a chairman, a board of management and all the red tape; they are just two people who love animals. Mike has a day job, and the income helps. They couldn’t manage without Glenmar Fish Processors in Union Hall, who are ever-generous. The quality of the otters’ fishy diet is reflected in their energy and in the beauty of their deep brown, deep-pile fur coats.

Caring for such a menagerie is a full-time job. Last Sunday, we watched June feed the latest addition, young Diesel, a three-month-old female otter, so called because it was found as a very small baby in the smelly engine compartment of a boat. The boat owner put it on the bank, but the mother didn’t reclaim it. Through various people, it arrived at Mike and June’s.

Approaching 18 inches long, it rushed out of its hut the moment June entered the enclosure and charged around her legs following its tail. When she sat down, it leaped onto her lap, stretched itself on its back, took the bottle of special milk between its paws and proceeded to feed itself with an expression of utter otter bliss.

We saw Ozzie only for a few seconds as his dodged out of his burrow to take a fish. He was older than Diesel when found abandoned in County Meath — too young to survive but, happily, not needing too-close human contact, which is ideal.

When Diesel is weaned, the plan is to put them in cages side-by-side, so Diesel will meet a natural-born otter and get to realise it isn’t a human itself. Then, the cages will be opened to let them come and go as they please, the process of “soft release”.

One animal they cannot release is Billy Baggins, found as a cub, but not weaned for sufficiently long by its finder and so it developed rickets. Its front paws are twisted and it couldn’t survive in the wild. Happily, it can look forward to a long, well-fed life with the Foxes.