West Virginia has a growing river otter population.
According to the West Virginia DNR, the river that runs through my home county now has a healthy population of the aquatic mustelids living on it.
When I was a child, one would hear stories about otters– and these would be followed by scoffs that such animals would eat all the game fish. I remember stories about an old farmer shooting an otter out of his farm ponds and then driving it 40 miles to throw it off a bridge into a different river system. Otters were protected, and some of these animals had tracking devices on them. There was a kind of macabre hope that the otter thrown from the bridge would confound those smarty pants DNR experts. I don’t think it did. The bullet hole kind of gave it away.
Well, there still are game fish, and the Little Kanawha remains one of the wildest rivers that runs through the Allegheny Plateau to the Ohio. It runs through what are mostly forests and farm fields. The Industrial Revolution didn’t really come here. Its effects are minimal.
And even at that, the fish are all full of mercury, and the state has strong suggestions on how many fish one should eat.
But the otters are here.
They were killed off in the days of the early fur trade.
Otters are also very sensitive to water quality. Because their diet is mostly fish, any toxins that the fish accumulate from their lives in the river will wind up adversely affecting the otters.
I hope the otters are back for good. I hope people will learn to appreciate them from what they are. I hope that one day we can have a regulated otter trapping season, just as we now do with fishers and bobcats. Both bobcats and fishers were once quite rare in the state. The fisher entirely disappeared, and only returned through reintroducing them from New Hampshire. The bobcats are now common enough that they can be seen slinking around the outskirts of towns.
Someday the otters will be the common. People will tell you about seeing an otter, and it will be like saying that one has seen a deer or a rabbit or a raccoon.
They will become part of the landscape again.
If only we don’t screw this up again.
A good while back, some “sportsmen’s” efforts in an area in the Northern U. S.(New England somewhere?) went to some pains to eradicate its otters from its streams to increase the gamefish–mainly trout–populations. Their campaign to get rid of the otters was quite successful, and the trout population quickly plummeted! Seems otters also eat a LOT of crayfish, and crayfish eat a lot of trout eggs…..here in N. C., we are seeing lots of otters again, statewide, and it is wonderful! We have wild otters that visit our grounds at the N. C. Zoo regularly, including raising their babies here, and we get to see them fishing all the time(including catching and eating lots of crayfish and frogs!). It is a privelege and a joy to see them again I will never take for granted……
Glad to hear that they’re coming back in some areas. I’ve never actually seen one in the wild. I would love to see them recover in the New River drainage, too. Though I’m already worried about the raccoons, filthy as it is now. There’s lots of heavy metals coming from illegal dumping in a quarry at Radford, too, not to mention the Bluestone’s PCBs and who knows what else.
If only we don’t screw this up again.
*nods*
West Virginia is a very polluted place. We like to think we breathe clean mountain air and drink the freshest water in the country.
What a delusion!
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