by John Kulish
I believe the otter’s rut begins in the middle of February and ends about the middle of March. This deduction is based on the sudden, drastic change in their behavior during those weeks. Only nature’s most powerful urge can change shy, cautious creatures into bold, impulsive ones.
Some accepted authorities claim the female otter has a variable gestation period of from 280 to 380 days after mating “in the spring.” This would infer that the young would be born sometime between the following December and April. This puzzles me. Based on a lifetime’s observation, the female otter definitely does not bear young every year. Of the hundreds of otter I have observed, I have yet to see a family with siblings of different ages; but yearlings traveling with mother and dad are usual. Furthermore, based on the size of the smallest pups I have examined during the months of November and December, I would say they had more likely been born in May or June.
Over a period of thirty-five years, during the months of November and December, I have examined dozens of female otter, ranging in age from yearlings to matriarchs of eight or nine years. None of them showed any signs of pregnancy. The overwhelming majority of them were married.
Mrs. Otter generally gives birth to her young in an abandoned beaver lodge. Sometimes she may pick a den in a riverbank, but the maternity ward must always have an underwater entrance. Above all, the female chooses her delivery room as far away as “animally” possible. She usually gives birth to two pups. During four decades of field work, I have observed only a half-dozen triplets. The young remain with their parents for approximately a year and a half before venturing out on their own; there is much to learn. Courses on “How to Avoid Highways,” “How to Steer Clear of Duck Hunters,” and “The Identification of Enemy Traps” are stressed.
During the mating season, single or widowed otter become obsessed. My first experience with one in search of a mate amazed me. In the early fall of 1928, the dam went out in a small, then primitive pond, which was the headwaters of a large river basin. One morning, the following November, while trapping mink, I heard a commotion in a deep pool below the broken dam. An investigation revealed fresh otter sign near a den under an overhanging bank where a pair had set up temporary housekeeping. The fishing was too good to leave. The one otter trap I had with me was set. The next day it held a big female.
During the following January and February, while checking mink traps, I snowshoed up and down this same brook. There was no otter sign until early March. One morning, shortly after daybreak, I approached the brook a half-mile below the broken dam. Within hours, a large single otter had gone upstream and come back down. Intrigued because both sets of tracks had been made less than an hour apart, I followed the trail. The otter had headed straight for the den under the bank. It had checked it thoroughly. Then, without hesitating, it had headed back downstream. During the next two days, I followed its trail down the main river for more than thirty miles. It did not fish. It did not play. It did not visit any of a dozen tributaries. It had come back up the river with but one question in its mind. It had found the answer.
If land and freshwater mammals held a swimming meet, every medal, gold, silver, and bronze, would be copped by otter. The beaver also swims to live, but where an otter is swift and powerful, the beaver is only powerful. The one is a tugboat, its wide, sturdy hull powered by two oversize paddles, pushing and pulling heavy timber about its do-it-yourself canals and ponds. The other is a racy destroyer, propelled by four screws and, aided and guided by a streamlined rudder, constantly harassing and intercepting convoys of fish.
These speedsters can swim underwater for almost a half-mile. Of all the freshwater mammals, they can stay underwater the longest, and a surprised otter can make a getaway worthy of a commando.
Rain had swelled the river at Barre Falls before a sudden cold snap froze the sides of the stream as well as the flooded swamps bordering it, leaving twenty yards of open water in the middle. Crashing up along the shell ice, I heard something else smashing through in the dead grass ahead, followed by a loud splash. Running to the river, I saw what had happened. While getting breakfast, an otter had also climbed up onto the shell ice covering the bank. Hearing me, he had bounded back into the stream. In the few seconds it took me to reach the river, his head reappeared 900 feet downstream. Confident again in his own element, he reared up with half his body facing me. Wary as he was, he couldn’t resist looking back.
Otter find weak places in ice, lunge up, break through with their heads, and emerge. How do they identify these weak spots? To me, they look no different from the stronger ice. Obviously, their know-how is built-in. When a pond or a lake is solidly frozen over with several feet of ice, they resort to a subway. Erosion forms tunnels around large tree roots that extend into water. Otter know every one of them. They twist and turn upward along these subterranean, water-filled channels until they suddenly pop out of a hole in the ground, sometimes a dozen or more feet from the pond. Many times, I have followed the subsequent trail along the shore for a considerable distance before it again suddenly disappeared into the ground. They seem to know exactly where to find the entrance to a tunnel leading into a pond, even though it may be covered with several feet of snow.
Only during the rut are they likely to traverse the full lengths of backwoods ponds and lakes, stopping at islands and on peninsulas. Even when compelled by nature’s most powerful urge, they still prefer to travel during a storm when the ceiling is zero.
In March, 1967, a large single otter journeyed up one such deserted pond for two miles. It left its tell-tale trail like a cause-way on the windswept snow, before vanishing into a hole under a clump of buttonbush on a tiny island. The neat opening in the snow seemed too small to accommodate the otter’s solid body, but if the whiskers go through, so will the rest.
A day after this sighting, twenty miles away on a different watershed, another bachelor came out below a small beaver dam beside a secondary road, left his calling card, then traveled overland for four hundred feet. Three-quarters of the way up, he decided to cross the highway, but at the very edge of the black-top, he changed his mind. He skied another hundred feet along a snowbank before turning around and going back to the beaver pond. He gave me the definite impression that he had never been there before. He entered the pond above the dam via a hole barely eight inches across at its widest. Because the length of impressions from the tip of the forefeet to the tip mark of his tail averaged forty-five inches, this dog was of marrying age. The average length between jumps was twenty-five inches. While traveling away from the pond, his jumps were a uniform, hands-in-the-pockets saunter, but, on the return trip, something startled him and the jumps became erratic. For over fifty feet the familiar dot-dash-dot imprints of an otter in a hurry marked the corn snow. In all, he made five slides measuring from four to sixteen feet, the longest being a traverse of a sudden declivity demanding the skill of an Olympic bobsled driver.
Awkward on land, otter leave a strange trail in mud or in clay, with a series of paw imprints, but with no body mark, as if a giant inchworm had measured its way along the water’s edge. Evidently, they don’t like to get mud on their pants.
Having been designed for water travel, the short legs are not meant for snowshoeing. However, these prodigies know how and when to travel overland in winter. Whenever snow is deep, hard-packed, and topped by one to three inches of powder, an otter races along by employing gymnastics, shifting into overdrive, and having fun doing it. It accomplishes this by taking two or three energetic, power-building jumps, each about two or three feet long, depending on the size of the animal, then diving headlong onto the snow with stubby front legs tucked underneath, and body, hind legs, and tail splayed out behind; exactly like a child who picks up a sled and runs with it before flopping it down to get a faster, longer ride. Thus otter slide forward effortlessly, until the momentum slackens, whereupon they leap to their feet to repeat the jumps and slides. The length of each slide varies with the snow conditions. If the snow is perf
ect, so’s the sliding, for nature has equipped them with built-in “flying saucers.”
While striding along the undeveloped shores of Stony Pond, I noticed an otter’s ski tracks a few yards ahead. Leaving one of the inlets, it had skidded the entire 1½-mile length of the pond. This rare opportunity to measure the length of a slide delighted me. My size ten boot, toe to heel, went twenty-one times along one slide. That’s quite a broad jump, good enough for competition! No more than two preparatory leaps linked each slide to the next.
Like any skier, otter take advantage of gravity by schussing every slope going their way. At the top of a hill, they throw themselves forward. Since their steering wheels are designed for water rather than for snow travel, as they gather momentum, they often whirl right into a tree, ricochet off, and continue down to the foot of the hill. Because they are so supple, tough-hided, and well muscled, they don’t get hurt. I have often measured downhill schuss marks 75 to 100 feet long. Their paternalistic pattern of family living also carries over onto the ski slope, for when cross-country skiing, the family goes in single file, with the dog breaking trail for his wife and children.
The hungrier an otter is, the faster it swims. One morning, as my canoe slid silently around a bend of a river, ripples wrinkled the smooth surface ahead, signifying the presence of a swimming animal. An otter’s head broke the surface, then another’s. I decided to watch until they saw me. The stream of bubbles, constantly coming to the surface, gave me a tracking pattern. They appeared, first in a straight line, then veered suddenly to either an abrupt left or right, ending only when a wet skull popped up with a fish crosswise in its triumphant mouth. That day on the big deadwater proved something I had suspected for years. An otter can outswim any fish, anytime, anywhere.
Otter eat whatever variety they find. In southern New Hampshire and Massachusetts, that limits them to suckers, dace, perch, sunfish, minnows, pickerel, and pout. Fish bones and fish scales predominate in all their scat. A quick glance tells which piscatorial delight this native Isaac Walton has been eating. Are there the vulgar scales of the sucker, the shiny ones of the dace, the black pulp of the hornpout, the amber scales of the trout, or the tough, pink shells of the crayfish? Ninety-nine per cent of otter scat I have examined during the last four decades contained the scales of coarse, warm-water fish—very rarely the delicate scales of trout. This is not a matter of taste. Otter like trout as much as I do. But, like me, they have to settle for what there is. Because our brooks are slow and sluggish and our ponds shallow, the waters are warm. Trout do not live in warm water. Otter do not fish brooks near roads, even though they may have been stocked with trout. Highways and otter do not mix. If one chooses to travel up one of these streams, it does not stop to fish. It only uses the waterway to reach a secluded pond where it will be safe from man.
Most fishermen seem to think otter menace our trout population, citing the scarcity in ponds reclaimed by the state; for anglers rarely catch a trout after the first of May. “The otter get ’em all!” they argue.
Have you ever fished a reclaimed pond on opening day? If you arrive after six in the morning, you’ll have to park your vehicle a half-mile from the public landing. Even then, an hour later, you’ll have your limit. Everyone does. On the second day, you’ll catch trout, hooked the day before, whose jaws are too sore to permit a second escape. Don’t go back the third day. The trout are all gone—until next year. This is strictly a put-and-take proposition: “we put them in today; you take them out tomorrow,” with the stocking taking place as close to opening day as the ice permits, so that the fish will survive. It would be sheer coincidence if an otter, on his regular route, arrived at a reclaimed pond in the few hours between the departure of a hatchery truck and the arrival of the rubber-shod hordes.
Even if otter knew when the trucks were coming, they would not be there to welcome them. Most of these ponds are completely surrounded by cottages. A scant fifteen years ago I could have taken you to a dozen marshy ponds and showed you fresh otter sign. Today, those mudholes have been reclaimed by land developers, with row upon row of camps. An otter hasn’t been there since the first nail was driven.
Even if an otter were to get into a fish hatchery, it wouldn’t stay. The taste of trout is not worth the sight and smell of men. If these fish lovers live in natural trout country, of course they will eat them. Why not? Aren’t they the natives and we the outsiders? But because they fear man, they avoid his roads and his dwellings. Trout and otter share a common enemy.
Like any good Yankee, the otter makes do with what there is. Paradoxically, he can also be a gourmet, often traveling miles to reach a certain pond offering a favorite tidbit: a painted turtle or a crayfish, the freshwater lobster already alluded to. He relishes frogs, and, on rare occasions, will eat a muskrat. Inexperienced zoologists often think the fur they sometimes observe in otter scat belonged to a beaver. It is muskrat. Even though the entire animal is eaten, the fur passes through the intestinal tract intact. Obviously, some sort of natural therapy is involved; the fur scrapes off fish scales stuck to the plumbing.
Once, when a light dusting of snow had transformed the clear river ice into alabaster, I was walking gingerly down a frozen river. As I came around a bend, dark splotches discolored the snow-covered ice ahead. A pair of otter, passing through the night before on their regular itinerary, had slithered onto the ice through a hole formed by the warm flow of an underwater spring close to shore. The water temperature here was above freezing. Even when surrounded by thick ice, spring holes remain open throughout the winter, enlarging during a thaw and becoming smaller whenever extreme cold follows a heavy snowfall. An otter’s built-in compass points magnetic north to every such spa.
These two had dug up a hibernating turtle, to eat only those parts protruding beyond the shell. Hoping that terrapin on the whole shell might spice their midwinter menu, they had rummaged around in the mud at the bottom of the spring until one of them had latched onto a snapping turtle. Clambering out onto the ice to relish the tidbit, they shook themselves, splashing mud onto the snow. Otter have a weakness for their own kind of hors d’oeuvres, and never bypass a potential snack bar.
I have examined the remains of many such turtles, most of them eight to ten inches in diameter. This one barely measured three inches across. After bringing it up onto the ice, the gourmets had decided it wasn’t worth a cracked molar and left it there. The wee turtle crept ten halting inches before freezing to death, its tiny head, tail, and diminutive feet extended. I still have the turtle shell, with an otter tooth mark perfectly preserved. It’s the only time I ever saw turtle tracks in the snow.
Every time I fish white water, I remember a pair of otter who taught me something. Although it was the end of November, no snow had fallen, and the section of river consisted of a series of frozen dead waters 75 to 100 yards long, connected by short stretches of white water. Approaching the river, I discovered the still steaming scat of two otter. Hoping to catch a glimpse of the pair as they headed upstream, I loped through the woods for a couple of hundred yards before cutting back to the water’s edge. No luck. After three such sallies I finally came out just below some rapids. Hearing a commotion a short distance upstream, I swung about to look.
Two dark bodies thrashed and boiled in the white water. One burst to the surface with a twelve-inch sucker in its mouth. It rode the rapids downstream, bobbing with the current until reaching the frozen deadwater, where it slid swiftly and smoothly onto the ice. Almost at once the second otter followed, a sucker jutting out beyond its whiskers. They ate dinner on the icy table. With the last crunch each slid into the quiet pool below the rapids. Alarmed, and seeking safety, the suckers raced for the white water upstream, the otter hot on their tails. What a chase it was, beginning with a hit-or-miss, upside-down, inside-out pursuit, always ending with a fish crosswise in an otter’s mouth. The otter knew that in fleeing the white water, the fish would bunch up, making them easier to catch. With each personal encounter, my res
pect for nature’s Ike Walton increased.
Here is a mammal which takes seriously the old adage about “all work and no play.” Because I knew it still remained one of their favorite retreats, I approached the spongy northeast shore stealthily. Among the stumps that pincushioned the boggy pond, a family of three otter were noisily champing down a pout supper. I don’t know how long they had been fishing, but as I arrived they suddenly started to chase one another over and under water-soaked logs and decaying dead trees floating around the stumps. The players of this follow-the-leader touch football got going so fast they flowed over the bobbing obstructions like so much animated syrup. When the one being chased turned abruptly to egg on his pursuer, I swear he was grinning. Then, just as suddenly, they changed roles. Surfacing like a seal or a porpoise, this Yankee cousin catapults skyward high enough to show most of its sleek belly, with the chunky forelegs neatly folded under. Watching until the otter family disappeared in a cove, still rollicking, I knew none of their clan could ever develop ulcers or hypertension. Ever since that autumn day, whenever feelings of guilt about finishing a stone wall or cleaning the cellar assail me, I remember those happy acrobats and reach for my fishpole or my snowshoes.
Because they are intelligent and sensitive, otter are also wary. Having learned in their youth that man is their only enemy, they remain an animal of the backcountry. Whenever a village with its inevitable dam interrupts an otter’s journey up or down a river, he hesitates. Sensing danger wherever buildings stand guard on either side of a dam, he stops a half-mile above the barrier to wait for a stormy night. Only then does he leave the river and head for the woods, bypassing the settlement, to re-enter the protecting cover of water a quarter-mile beyond the last building.