The lives of otters
It is hard to believe that they were once hunted largely for pleasure, and otterhound packs were expensively maintained. An otter didn’t stand much chance when, having outdistanced the dogs by swimming faster, huntsmen would, on occasion, drive it back into the pack of hounds. Nevertheless, it sometimes escaped death’s jaws by skilful turning, twisting and diving. Happily, the 1976 Wildlife Act protected otters, and hunting was banned four years later.
The otter we recently saw in the River Suir wore a mud-pack on its face. It must have been grubbing on the bottom for crustaceans. As it swam upriver, its grace was beautiful to behold, its sleek body breaking the surface every 10 metres or so, surfacing and disappearing in a series of shallow dives.
Over the years, I have recorded some close encounters with otters in this column. In July, 2010, a friend of my son’s, attending to boats on Courtmacsherry pier, was surprised to find a baby otter wandering about. He fed it some fish, which it accepted without fear. He then picked it up but it soon jumped from his arms into the bay. Concerned for its survival, he followed it in a boat and was pleased to see it swim off, perfectly at home in the fast-flowing channel.
On the same pier, my son and friends, having reeled in a line of squirming mackerel, were startled to see an otter leap onto the pontoon, whisk a fish off a hook and dart underneath the structure where they watched it eat the mackerel as Bugs Bunny might eat a carrot.
A reader informed me of a very large otter cantering along the quays in the centre of Cork city, apparently unconcerned by pedestrians or traffic. And, in quite a different environment, in April 1994, my wife, son and I saw two otters swimming below the Old Head of Kinsale, in a storm-lashed sea.
They swam to a jagged sea stack, where they scrambled ashore. A minute later, they had disappeared “into the cold and darkening evening, survivors in an element of which we could never be part.”
It is no wonder otters are creatures of romance and that they have been the subject of classic stories and poems. Gavin Maxwell’s book, Ring of Bright Water, about rearing an otter he brought back from Iraq in the wilds of Scotland, perhaps entranced more readers than any other otter book. He describes the animal as “boneless, mercurial, sinuous, wonderful… he was an otter in his own element and the most beautiful thing in nature I had ever seen.”
But Tarka the Otter, by Henry Williamson, published in 1927 is certainly the most famous otter ever caught in story. The heart-stopping adventure, told from the otter’s-eye-view tells of a valiant hunted animal, his peace regularly shattered by the baying of hounds. His bravery culminates in a dramatic 10-hour hunt where he battles with his terrifying nemesis, the giant otterhound Deadlock.
Michael Longley wrote a fine poem about otter cubs, and when Seamus Heaney published his poem, Otter (which is about a woman swimming) his fellow poet Ted Hughes sent him an otter pelt as a gift.
As Miriam Darlington, another otter author, remarked, “Heaney’s thrilling poetry could inspire any woman to limber up and swap her swimsuit for the pelt of an otter.”
Hughes’s own poem, An Otter, finishes with a lament for the otter’s fate at human hands, where for all its beauty, it “reverts to nothing at all, / to this long pelt over the back of a chair.”
Over centuries, otter skins were often fashioned into fur coats for women, and I recall many years ago working in a casual job for the Hudson Bay Company bringing pallets of Russian otter skins to street level from the cold rooms deep beneath the City of London where the air was frozen and grey as wood smoke. In panelled chambers, buyers in smart suits would assess them before I returned them to the icy labyrinths, silent and eerie as the moon.
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