The Otters’ Tale. Simon Cooper
driven out the otters. Nothing could be further from the truth. Today, with otters in the ascendant, mink are finding themselves marginalised, and their population is declining.
Habitat destruction, mostly in the relentless process of urbanisation, will always be an issue for otters. Actually the worst of the damage was probably done in the 1940s and 50s when, again in the name of food production, vast swathes of otter-friendly wetlands were drained and thousands of miles of rivers straightened and dredged. Disturbance? Well, that was cited in the form of more leisure uses for rivers – boating, fishing, canoeing and so on – but otters are pretty tolerant of minor human incursions into their territory and no amount of daytime splashing would have had a significant effect. Water quality (aside from the organochlorines) was actually by this time going in the opposite direction, improving rather than worsening. The River Thames is often cited, reaching its polluted nadir in 1957 when classified as a ‘dead’ river, incapable of sustaining a fish population. Since then, along with most other rivers, the situation has improved, with salmon now regularly running up the capital’s river. Confusing? Well, only if you were directed, as most people were, to look in the wrong places. But for those close to the science, otter postmortem data was tightening the noose around the neck of organochlorines – the problem was that nobody in power was prepared to pull the lever that consigned them to death instead of the otters.
Finally, a report in 1968 that charted the catastrophic collapse in otter numbers captured the headlines, leading to a general acceptance, albeit grudgingly in certain circles, that organochlorines were the problem. However, vested interest and inaction delayed the widespread banning of their use until 1975. This you might think was a cause for dancing in the street, but they were simply replaced by the equally bad organophosphates the following year with, almost unbelievably, the original chemical continuing in use for commercial bulb farming in Cornwall and the compulsory practice of sheep dipping right through to 1992. In that same year, the authorities finally called time on organophosphates, replacing them with synthetic pyrethroids. Relief? Well, not really. The synthetic substitute, rather than infecting the food chain, went a step further by wiping out entire groups of invertebrates – so the very insects that fed the fish that fed the otters were disappearing. This new menace was finally banned in 2006.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if your head is spinning from all these dates and scientific terms, but I chart it because it is truly amazing that, despite fifty years of sustained attrition, albeit unintentional, otters are still with us today. As with everything to do with these secretive creatures, it is hard to pinpoint the exact moment when the population reached its lowest point, but most observers seem to agree that it was some time in the 1990s – by then it was estimated that otters were only present in a handful of English counties. In Wales, Scotland and Ireland, with less intensive agriculture, the numbers had held up better. But the long road to recovery, which continues to this day, had begun. It was never going to be a fast journey; the ‘organos’, with their various suffixes, have to dissipate gradually from the food chain. Otters are not the most prolific breeders at the best of times, their progress tied to the health of the rivers and the availability of food. Fortunately they hung on in enough places to keep a breeding population alive; the areas mostly away from agriculture and industry. And that otter society requirement for the juveniles to travel great distances to find new, unoccupied territories had started to disperse a new population nationwide.
As luck (they finally got some) would have it, they had some breaks along the way: more legal protection, better environmental oversight of the watercourses and an explosion in the crayfish population – one of their favourite and most nutritious foods. All of this culminated in a survey published during 2011 that had found otters in all the forty-eight English counties, Kent being the last piece in the jigsaw. But don’t be under any illusions that the danger is over; they remain rare and under threat.
Kuschta knew nothing of her rarity, nor the perilous past her recent ancestors had trod to bring her to this point. All she knew was that The Badlands should be her home. A place good for otters, bad for people, as you’d struggle to walk across this landscape without considerable difficulty and deviations. A very long time ago this was water meadows, low-lying land in the flood plain that was deliberately ‘drowned’, covered by water diverted from the river during the winter and spring, to boost the growth of grazing pasture for sheep and hay making. It didn’t happen by accident; seventeenth-century Dutch engineers had been engaged by the large landowners, church and gentry to dig side streams or, as they are correctly known, carriers that were regulated by wooden hatches all along the valley that enabled and controlled the flooding. If you think of a human skeleton with the river as the spine and the ribs as the man-made channels, then you will get some idea of the layout. Long abandoned to nature, the defunct Dutch engineering now defines this landscape.
So where you would struggle, Kuschta revels. To start with, you’d have a hard time even entering her domain from most points of the compass, protected as it is by thick swathes of dense, prickly hawthorn, the vicious barbed sloe bushes and bramble briars. Of course, for her this presents no problem, slaloming between the stems, free to come and go at will and unnoticed. There is one gate to The Badlands, which is not much used and is your best entrance. From the gate it is hard to tell much about the landscape beyond, as almost all you can see is reeds. They stretch ahead of you, to the left and the right, almost to the height of a man, obliterating your view of the horizon. In the winter the reeds are desiccated, bleached to a dirty cream with the grass-like seed pods furling out of the top. Occasionally a small songbird, a wren or robin, will alight to the top of the stem, swaying perilously from side to side as it pecks for scarce food.
Too wet for people or cattle, the occasional visitors to The Badlands at this time of year are dogs; in time Kuschta learnt to recognise the sound of their imminent arrival as the beaters sweep the surrounding fields on shoot days. The guns sound in the distance. The horn wails to signal the start and end of each drive. The click-click-click and clack-clack-clack of the beaters tapping their sticks against the trees is interspersed by shouts as they clear the woods of birds. The wild fluttering of wings, as a pheasant takes flight, is followed by cries of ‘forward’ to alert the shooters of incoming sport. Sometimes Kuschta will feel the ground quiver as a shot bird thumps into the ground somewhere close by. Occasionally she’ll see the last twitches of life play out in front of her. Soon the gun dogs appear, splashing through the water and crashing through the reeds, directed by whistles and calls from afar. There is no subtlety to their arrival, playing havoc with the snipe and curlew who rise fast to the air in protest, the unwise making flight over the line of guns. In truth, dogs of the retrieving kind are not much worry to Kuschta. At first she had fled in terror, bolting from her couch to the safety of the river. But now, a few months on, she knows to hold her ground. Mostly the dogs are too intent on finding the birds to even notice her. If one does, she’ll snarl and hiss at the barking canine until the distant handler, frustrated by a dog going feral, calls it back with irritated shouts and shrill whistles. Soon the dogs retreat, the noises fade and The Badlands is at peace again.
The side streams, once the open channels that carried water across the meadows, are now both Kuschta’s paths and her larders. If The Badlands were shorn of vegetation you could very easily spot what are today effectively a series of parallel ditches about 50 yards apart, radiating at right angles away from the river, the ground between each rising and falling to create a gentle mound. From a distance it is a landscape that might look like a soft swell rolling in to a shore. If you choose to traverse The Badlands you’d be well advised to follow along the length of the mounds – they are relatively dry and firm underfoot. If you make your path by crossing the old streams in turn, prepare for a long and tiring effort. Though not exactly quicksand or bottomless pits, these are cloying obstacles, too wide to jump and with no firm crust to support even the lightest person. But otters? Well, that was altogether a different story.
Aside from the sheep set on The Badlands for a month of grazing in the late summer, rarely did anything of any size interrupt Kuschta’s rule of this stretch. Too wet for rabbits, badgers or foxes and away from human intervention, the largest, wildest thing that came through were startled deer on the run. With springing leaps they would clear the tops of the reeds, but the success of each leap would entirely depend on the landing – hit a mound and they sprang on at speed. Hit an old stream and it was all legs, mud and rasping gasps