Of the Tyne. Have you ever wondered how an otter experiences and lives along and within the Tyne? I have many times, as I caught glimpses of their lives over the years and being lucky now and then to watch their habits. Putting these vignettes together and my experiences of watching otters in Scotland too, a typical autumn night might run something like this;
Unnoticed by anything, the old dog otter slides down the river bank next to the bridge at Haltwhistle, under the cover of darkness, into the black waters of the Tyne. Had anyone seen, they would have gasped at its serpentine shape caught in the moonlight and reflected colours of the aurora from the sky above, turning it silver and purple, before it dived deep.
The short-sighted otter couldn’t see the sky and wasn’t interested in anything other than food, he was hungry. This was the time the sea trout ran and he could sense their movement, smell their sea-liced bodies, moving up river.
It wasn’t long before he found fish, but not the migratory ones he sought, just a couple of eels and a brown trout he consumed on a rock mid flow, whiskers shedding Tyne droplets, as his boxing glove like face struggled to crunch the bones and swallow the skin.
Replete for now, the otter moved to the bankside. Anyone watching now would see him turning himself in circles to shed water and roll on his back, touching his hind quarters to rock, to set scent and riffle his thick coat, grooming it back to a sleek waterproof.
The otter was experienced at hunting and had fathered many cubs and had some now with a female further up river. But he played no part in their up bringing, in fact he kept his distance as is the otter’s way. His territory reached about 3 miles in either direction. Challenged by incomers on a regular basis, he had to mark his boundary constantly.
He knew of everything about the river and its life, and a little about its strange and unpredictable human nearby inhabitants, from whom he tried to keep distance and not draw attention from. Down the line of his otter ancestors, the ‘upright ones’, were known as fearless hunters, taking their kind with their dogs and guns, stealing their fish and bringing disruption and their inexplicable, gross outpourings, into the river. He had found their attempts at swimming laughable!
Something moved behind him, a loud rustling in the alders. He flinched and peered and sniffed the air, a badger nosing for worms by the hedge, gave him no fear. They were poor swimmers, slow and heavy, though were not to be bitten by.
On the river he sensed the movement of goosanders taking flight at his presence, and he moved off, sliding easily into the water as if it was nothing, transmuted into its watery element, caressing the flow as it changed from rough to smooth, between rock and weed. He surfaced several times around the meander to chase small fish for fun, enjoying their spraying out of the water ahead of him, as he advanced.
His main quarry was in a pool under a small ‘man-bridge’. They gave themselves away by their turbulence and fins breaking the surface, taking bites at night insects. He didn’t rush in and scatter them as they are big and fast. He crept first along the bankside, showing no silhouette and then launching like a torpedo he was among them, as many fish as he had toes on his paws. He embraced one as if he was dancing with it and then, as it writhed free, latched on to the next and this time took a bite behind its neck.
Dragging it into the shallows the salmon thrashed out its life as the otter took its fill, a fox would finish it off later and leave just its skin. A tawny owl screeched as the otter, full and tired now, sleeked into one of his ancient holts, in a hole under a large ash. He turned to sleep as the day broke.
Otters are there more than we expect, more common in the early 20th century and hunted until 1981. By then they had almost disappeared from our waterways due to heavy metal poisoning. As these were removed, they repopulated rivers, first coming down through Scottish into Northumbrian waters in the late 1990s. The Otter Project was one of the Wildlife Trusts’ first species initiatives.
These amazing animals are a real barometer of the state of our Northumbrian environment. So let’s all hope we can keep our waterways healthy enough for them to thrive, something that once again seems at risk, even in this relatively wild county and the valley of the Tyne.
