Читать книгу The Otters’ Tale - Simon Cooper - Страница 11

I’ve lived on and around rivers pretty well all my life, but it wasn’t until my fourth decade that I finally saw an otter. And even after all that waiting, that first sighting wasn’t under particularly auspicious circumstances.

I had just bought an abandoned water mill that straddles a small chalkstream in southern England, called Wallop Brook. It did, and still does, comprise two buildings – the miller’s cottage and the mill building. The former was just about habitable and the latter was really nothing more than a foursquare brick structure rising over three storeys, completely empty bar one important element: the mill wheel itself. I gleaned from the villagers (not all overly friendly when I first moved in …) that the corn-grinding mechanism had been stripped out years before, the last production sometime soon after the Second World War. A few things remained to remind a casual visitor of a past that stretched back over a thousand years – you will find the Nether Wallop Mill listed in the Domesday Book. The side wall of the building was hung with slates, faded white signwriting emblazoning in two-foot-tall letters the legend F. VINCENT’S NOTED GAME FOODS. The mill had produced both bird food for a wider market and, on a lesser scale, flour for Nether Wallop and the surrounding villages. Out in what is now the garden, where in the past sheep grazed up to the back door, there can be found a complicated array of a mill pond, pools, hatches, carriers and relief streams. It might look antediluvian to us today, but in Mr Vincent’s time, and long before that, too, these old-fashioned devices controlled the flows that were vital for driving the water wheel and sustaining the milling industry. In more modern times, and for my purposes, they are far from defunct, their control being the difference between me having a wet or dry house in times of flood.

As I write this today my feet are poked under a giant cast-iron spindle, the central core to an even more giant cast-iron mill wheel, the height of two men, that is separated from me by a low wall, topped by a glass partition to the ceiling. Effectively my office is divided in two – one half for me and the other half for the mill wheel. Despite the constant pummelling roar of the water next door (yes, every minute, of every hour, of every day, year in year out), I chose to build a desk over what used to be the drive mechanism for the grinding stones. If I look up I can see the marks in the ceiling beams where the power take off gear connected to the spindle to the grinding gear. Behind me is an old-fashioned winding handle that turns two cogs, which in turn lift an iron gate that controls the flow of water into the stream that powers the mill wheel. I only need turn the cogs two or three notches and the wheel will turn. It is a slow, powerful, creaking turn, the thirty-two buckets (the official term of a mill wheel paddle) taking nearly a minute to go full circle. I have to remember to keep my feet clear of the turning spindle when it is in motion.

But it wasn’t always like this. When I first arrived, the wheel was stopped and had been that way for years. In some distant past it had slipped out of level alignment; for a while it obviously continued to turn despite being out of kilter, cutting circular gouges in the wall that are still plain to see. But at some point it must have jumped out of the shoe in which the nub of the spindle sat, to lean at a crazy angle jammed up against the wall. The iron control gate had rusted away to nothing, the cogs that raised and lowered it long gone. You’d think that it was a hopeless case. Plenty suggested that I might just as well sell the iron for scrap. However, I am not that easily deterred. Believe it or not, there are still skilled wheelwrights working today. Men with boiler suits, toolboxes full of mighty spanners and hands perpetually ingrained with grease. They took one look at it, pronounced it sound and returned some weeks later with newly made parts that made the wheel operation whole again.

You might wonder why this is relevant to my first otter sighting. Well, there is a vaulted tunnel where the mill straddles the river, carrying away the water after it has powered through the wheel. After years of disuse that tunnel was virtually blocked. We had donned waders to check it out, jammed as it was with logs, mud, brushwood and all sorts, but really it was too dark and confined to tell much. I was all for some extreme raking to clear it, but the millwright guys assured me that the water would do all the work. So with great ceremony the iron gate was lifted for the first time in decades. The water flowed, the mill wheel turned and the tunnel gradually filled with water until the force was so great that a plug of ancient detritus burst through into the mill pool below. Suddenly the pool went from shallow and clear to deep and dirty. Tree roots, bald tennis balls, reeds, twigs and all sorts swirled in the surface, but something in the back eddy caught my eye. It looked like an over-inflated, half-sunk, part-hairy, grey and pink balloon. I dragged it closer with a stick.

I guessed it was something dead. At first I assumed it was a badger, but the long tail, denuded of hair in death, told another story. As the corpse flipped over, it was clearly an otter. I am no pathologist, but years of living in the country usually gives you some ability to tell what a creature has died of, or been killed by, but this otter was too far gone for any postmortem. The fur was peeling away, exposing the greying pink skin beneath. Bones were showing through the flesh of the legs. I suspect in a week or two it would have been unrecognisable even as an otter. So I can only surmise as to how it had died. In all probability it had crawled into the tunnel as a last place of refuge, hit perhaps by a car, which is common enough. Or maybe it was on the wrong end of a fight. Or perhaps it was simply old age. Whatever the reason, it was a sad way to see my first otter.

I must admit, at the time I didn’t think very much more about it, putting it down to a freak occurrence, but as I spent more time at my desk beside my newly refurbished mill wheel I started to have unexpected company. As I mentioned earlier, the wheel housing is a separate room of the mill, through which the river flows, splitting into two channels. One channel takes up about two-thirds of the width, over which hangs the wheel itself. The other third is the mill race, where the water pummels through. The race is a sort of relief channel through which the river is diverted when the wheel is not running. The whole wheel housing is effectively open to the elements with brick arches over the river at either end of the building. On the upriver, or inflow, side, two huge, ancient oak beams straddle the width of the room from which are hung the iron gates that control the flow through the two channels. It was these beams that the otters adopted as couches.

I say ‘the otters’, but I really have no true idea whether it was the same otter who arrived often or a series of visitors. The sightings were nearly always fleeting as I came into the room to sit at my desk; a blur caught in the corner of my eye followed by a splash. At first I ignored it, thinking it was, well, I don’t really know what I thought it was. A mink perhaps, or a stoat; they are far more common. Even a rat maybe. But one day when I was adjusting the control gates I saw shining atop one of the oak beams what today I would instantly recognise as a spraint. Back then, less so, or, if I’m being honest, not at all. A trip to my desk and a visit to Google put me right. I determined to be more discreet when entering the office next time.

However, my definition of discreet and that of an otter is a very long way apart. Two or three steps into the room was only ever the best I could do before the splash and the rapid departure. I did take to rushing outside to at least have the satisfaction of following the bubble trail as the otter headed off underwater. Sometimes he, or it could have been she, would surface to look back, but generally the last I would see was a wet sliver of fur slide itself over the weir and disappear into the pool below.

A few times I did get closer. One summer afternoon I went into the mill wheel room, blinking as I went from the bright sunshine to semi-darkness, only to be struck rigid at the sight of two otters sitting on the oak beams. Who was more shocked I have no idea. I looked at them, they looked at me. I didn’t move but they did, twisting and diving into the water, fleeing at speed. The other times were when I worked very early or very late at my desk. I’d hear some splashing and coughs of exertion as an otter hauled itself out of the water using the ironwork as a sort of ladder to perch on one of the beams, grooming and generally making itself comfortable before settling down. It was then, and still is now, a wonderful thing to see up close. Occasionally the otter would spy me, our eyes meeting and the reaction variable. Sometimes instant flight, other times mild curiosity before choosing to ignore me. The latter was fine by me. Working with an otter peering over your shoulder is an oddity worth getting used to.

It might seem odd that an otter would choose the mill wheel as such a regular stopping-off point, being, as it is, in the midst of a human habitation. But I think it is something of a combination of things that makes it so attractive – the antiquity, the lie of the land around the mill, the location and, more recently, an awful lot of fish. There is no doubt that they have been using that oak beam as a couch for a very long time. Spraints are not just odorous but are also pretty toxic in dung terms. Regular sprainting spots on grassland will turn the turf brown then dead. It will really take the ground a long while to recover, the deposits having much the same effect as spilling fuel or oil on your lawn; once you know what to look for, it is an easy way to tell whether otters are around. In a similar fashion, otters who live by the sea will take a particular liking to a prominent rock or outcrop. Clearly the spraints can’t do much damage to solid stone, but the spot will turn green in time, much like the copper roof of a church. Back closer to home, my oak beams have suffered a slightly different fate; each now has rotten indentations where the otters have laid down their marks over the years.

The land around the mill is a regular Spaghetti Junction of water courses; not only does the water go under the building but it goes around it on both sides – we are effectively moated. To put that into some sort of perspective, imagine you are looking directly at a rugby ball; from the top the three lines of stitching represent where the single river is split into three. Down the left goes the original Wallop Brook, a fast clear stream that burbles over gravel. Down the middle is a much wider, deeper slower river which we (confusingly) call the Mill Pond. It is this that drives the mill wheel, which is where the rugby ball laces would be. Down the right is a side stream, or carrier, a man-made channel that was created to regulate the level of the Mill Pond. All have been dug or adapted by man in past centuries to manage the water flow, with the addition of some connecting channels that run crossways between them. Downstream of the mill, at the base of the rugby ball, if you like, all three come back together where a united brook continues on its way into the water meadows.

All in all, this is otter heaven; when on land, there is no point at which an otter is ever more than a few bounds from the safety of water, and they do treat the respective streams as regular highways. I can see from the permanent tracks in the grass and the slides that they arrive via one stream, cross by land to another, tracking back to the original one further downstream by a different route. They barely deviate in the routes they follow; in the spring the fresh grass is pressed down, by summer it is pounded brown and in winter there is muddy track. And then, of course, there is the snow. They are, if nothing else, creatures of habit.

The mill is also on the edge of two of the Wallop villages that stand along the brook, our building being the first or last outpost, depending on your direction of travel. The two settlements, Over Wallop and Nether Wallop, like the territory of otters, are very linear. The ancient meaning of the word ‘wallop’ is hidden valley, and the combined villages stretch about three miles, the homes of just a few hundred people mostly hunched up close to the course of the river. I suspect that the mill wheel, the last stop after all those miles of habitation, is where otters can arrive and depart by water, almost like a proper holt, which must seem like a blessed refuge. Conversely, if they arrive from the direction of The Badlands (more about this place in a moment), after a trek over four or five miles of wild and barely habited river, the stopover with us must appeal for different, but equally important, reasons.

The one thing I haven’t mentioned is the trout lake, which for all the obvious reasons makes us an undoubted attraction on the itinerary of any otter. The lake, which lies just 35 yards to the west of the mill (to the left of that imaginary rugby ball) is fed by offshoots of the Wallop Brook that flow in at the top and out at the bottom. It is the shape of a kidney, which size-wise would more or less fit into a football field. There are grilles at the inflow and outflow to stop the trout escaping, but it is otherwise unprotected, just part of the landscape. But this is not really your normal lake. It is stuffed full of rainbow trout, because this is where I teach fly fishing – with new people coming every day you need a heavy density of fish, and during the season, April to October, the stock is replenished fortnightly from a local trout hatchery. I don’t like to diminish the status of the rainbows; they are hard-fighting fish that are great to catch and in their native North America they are wily survivors, but here, when the fishermen have gone home and the night falls, the odds are stacked against them when the otters come calling.

During the spring and summer when I go out to do my early morning rounds, clearing the sluices and adjusting the hatches in preparation for the fishing day ahead, I expect to find a fish corpse, or the evidence of one being caught, more or less every other day. Usually it is a victim of an otter, though occasionally it is a heron, but it is pretty easy to tell the difference. If it is an almost whole fish, the heron will have left tell-tale stab wounds. Conversely, if the bird has had time to eat pretty much all the fish, it will look more like a cartoon fish skeleton, the left-behind bones picked clean. Otters, on the other hand, generally start from the head down, eating everything, bones and all, as they go. In the depth of winter, when food is scarce, it is unusual to find part-eaten trout – protein is too scarce. It is only really in the summer, or when the mother is teaching the pups to fish, that otters abandon a trout without finishing it off. Sometimes I have to look really hard to see whether they have been, the only evidence those few flecks of blood or bright scales similar to what I saw on that snowy morning. I suspect the otters had been robbing me blind of trout for years without me ever knowing it.

As winter clutched at the throat of the countryside, daily squeezing every last drop of life from the less hardy inhabitants, Kuschta took to exploring her new territory. Unfettered by the constraints of other otters, she was free to move at will, marking the land along the Wallop Brook from the junction pool to the headwaters, where it is barely a river at all as the bright crystal water springs from the ground. If you flew up the valley like a bird you’d see that, despite all the apparent habitation – houses, farms, roads and all the other things that civilisation brings in its wake – the Wallop Valley is surprisingly wild. Woodland crowds up to the bank for at least a quarter of its length, hiding the river from prying eyes. Water meadows, rough-grazed by cattle and flecked with wild flowers, merge the land with the water. In some places it is just a river lost in a wetland swamp. We call this lost place downstream of the Mill The Badlands, where reed beds, crisscrossing rivulets, soft soggy ground and a scruffy, fallen willow plantation look like a terrific mess. It is rarely visited by people. Sure, there are some tidy gardens that come up to the edge of the brook in places, bits that have been adapted for things like my mill or banks that have been realigned to prevent flooding, but on the whole it is a natural stream that hasn’t changed much in the past two or three centuries.

When we think about the history of our landscape, it is strange that otters don’t feature more in British folklore, history and culture, for they have been part of our lives since the first moment man made settlements on the banks of a river. From that time onwards, as we invaded the territory that they had called their own for millions of years, otters were amongst us but never really part of us – mysterious creatures that we saw rarely and understood even less. The inns along the highways of Britain are testament to this absence; the names The White Hart, The Black Horse, The Bear, The Swan, The Bull and even The Black Rat offer an insight to the creatures that have impinged on our culture down the centuries. But The Otter Inn? Well, there are some, but very few considering it is our largest semi-aquatic mammal.

The more you think about it, the stranger it is. After all, otters are not exactly small; nose to tail they are close to four feet long. A fully grown male weighs around twenty-two pounds – that is heavier than a terrier or about the same as a beagle. In feline terms, think twice the weight of a healthy cat and twice the body length. And a river through a town is a much-watched place – you’d think they would hardly go unnoticed, plus you’d expect that the numerous opportunities for food would draw them into human orbit. Rats and foxes have adapted to human habitation, thriving on our detritus and finding homes that man has, by accident rather than design, created for them. But not otters. They seem to shun the opportunities afforded by man, even changing their habits to become yet more secretive.

We think of otters as nocturnal, but they can equally be diurnal – active by day instead of night. On the south and west coast of Ireland otters regularly swim past anglers during the day; visitors are astonished, whilst for the locals it is so common as to pass unremarked. It is the same in the Scottish Isles, suggesting that where people are sparse otters are content to alter their behaviour accordingly. When they choose the night, they do it to avoid their greatest adversary – man.

Maybe there was a time long, long ago when man and otter lived in perfect harmony. After all, nobody ever seems to suggest that otters make good eating. They were not hunted for food, unlike the slow-witted beaver who, also native and incredibly populous to Britain at one time, was hunted to extinction as soon as early man took to living in the river valleys. In fact, the only people who seemed regularly to eat European otters was a group of Carthusian monks in Dijon, France, who stretched the truth to get around some awkward theological dietary requirements. Banned by holy order from consuming meat, they cunningly deemed the otter to be a fish. Now whether this was because it ate fish or lived like a fish, nobody is exactly sure, but accounts of the time rated the flesh ‘rank and fishy’, so the monks must have been somewhat desperate.

So aside from a few monks, maybe there was a time when the otter went about its daily life without a care in the world. A time when the fish were plentiful and the people few, when otters were free to range over huge tracts of unsettled land where the rivers were wild and the woodland dense. A time when otters feared nobody and wanted for nothing. It is a lovely thought; a sort of aquatic Garden of Eden. But if such a time ever existed it most certainly came to an end in the Middle Ages, when the population of Europe increased. Communities coalesced around rivers, the fertile valleys were gradually cleared and drained for agriculture. What was done a thousand or fifteen hundred years ago across southern England was not so very different to what is being done to the rainforests of South America today. The destruction of a habitat that slowly marginalises the indigenous species. Some will survive this change, others will become extinct. A few will become mortal enemies of man; unwelcome at best, feared at worst. The history of medieval times tells us that the otter fell into the ‘unwelcome’ category, labelled as the ‘fish-killer’, stealing food from the rivers that ‘rightfully’ belonged to the more ‘deserving’ mankind. It is a tag that remains today, but the persecution dates back many centuries.

The more you look back, the more astonishing it is that otters have avoided extinction in the British Isles. We might think of the eradication of a species as a rather modern manifestation of human behaviour, but otters have been on the hit list for over a thousand years. Way back in the twelfth century society went to war with the otters and lutracide was born. Henry II appointed the wonderfully titled King’s Otterer, who was charged with the extermination of the species. It was no passing fad; this was serious business. With the title came a manor house, land and an annual stipend all bundled up in legislation to create the Otterer’s Fee. The first Otterer, a man called Roger Follo, from his ‘Fee’ in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, went about his task with a new form of otter control, namely an otter-hound pack.

However innovative and hard-working the Honourable Follo might have been, any success must have been transitory, for by the fifteenth century Henry VI was back at it again with the creation of the Valet of our Otter-Hounds. But otters continued on their merry way until 1566, when, frustrated by their continued existence, Parliament passed the Acte for the Preservation of Grayne, which classified otters, along with badgers, foxes, hedgehogs¹ and others, as vermin, allowing parish councils to offer bounties for their capture. Sixpence, the reward for a dead otter in the early 1600s, strikes me as a lot of money and gives some indication of how otters had become a significant public enemy.

It is interesting to ask why otters were elevated to this status. I think we can say with some degree of certainty that their fate as public mammal enemy number one was cast for the next three centuries in 1653 when Izaak Walton wrote about them in The Compleat Angler – a huge bestseller when it was first published and subsequently one of the most reprinted books of all time. He declared,

‘I am, Sir, a Brother of the Angle, and therefore an enemy of the Otter; for I hate them perfectly, because they love fish so well.’

This is pretty stern stuff for an animal that carried no disease, kept clear of people and posed no physical danger. But the fact is that otters were eating the fish owned by those who held the reins of power: the monarchy, noblemen, the church and the educated. These were singularly bad groups to antagonise. Noblemen owned the rights to fish rivers, which was an important source of income and food. Fishing grounds were jealously guarded – not just physically but in law, for they were specifically mentioned in the Magna Carta. The draconian law that went as far as capital punishment was enough to keep the commoners at bay, but otters required something else. Monasteries and the palaces of bishops had for centuries reared fish in ponds, but they were difficult to protect and made tempting pickings for a hungry otter in the depths of winter. Then people such as Walton discovered the joys of angling as a pastime, which pretty well sealed the public perception of the otter. Whether they truly posed a threat to fish stocks is debatable, but the fact remained that otters had got on the wrong side of the wrong people.

So the notion of the otter as a quarry became entrenched in the psyche of the nation; along with foxes and deer, the hunting of these animals with hounds was an accepted pastime. It was both part of the social fabric of the British Isles and a requirement for the management of the countryside, albeit the latter of dubious value. You’d have thought that as feudalism gave way to industrialisation society would lose interest in the otter, but not a bit of it. In the Victorian era, otter hunting became quite the fashionable pursuit, reaching its zenith in the years between the two World Wars. However, for all its barbarism, twentieth-century hunting barely put a dent in the otter population. Ironically, it was the hunts, with fewer otters to hunt, who first alerted a wider public to the decline in their numbers across post-war Britain, as over two decades – the 1950s and 60s – otters all but vanished from the countryside. Hovering on the brink of extinction, the search was on for the otters’ insidious foe before it was too late.

What has changed over the past half century in our country is the otter population. Wind back the clock eighty years ago or more and it is a fair bet that Kuschta would have faced fierce competition along the Wallop Brook, with probably just two or three miles to call her own compared to the nine miles over which she ranges today. The truth is that otters are just clawing their way back from the edge of extinction.

It really was a mighty achievement of twentieth-century man to bring otters to this sorry point in time, where their very existence was threatened. After all, we have succeeded where centuries of persecution have failed, but we did it entirely by accident, and then in recognising the ongoing damage we failed over successive decades to put it right. It will be of no comfort to know that we were not alone in this. Across Europe – in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Finland, Sweden – and in fact in just about every mainland country, we have seen a catastrophic decline in the population of otters in the post-war era. A culture of persecution continued to play a part; in Switzerland there were 40–60 otters left when given protection in 1952. By 1960 they were all gone. To give you some idea of the level of hatred, three captive otters in Zurich Zoo were killed by visitors. But ultimately it was a poison, spread in the name of progress, that took otters to the brink.

Seven decades on from the end of the Second World War, it is hard fully to understand the mind-set of a Britain traumatised by a conflict that had kept the nation on the brink of imminent starvation. What we would now call food security, the ability to feed the population with crops grown on home soil, was the mantra of all governments of all hues in the years immediately after the war right through to the 1970s. As the Minister for Agriculture, you would have been one of the top five men in the cabinet; today you would be an also ran. The National Farmers Union held sway at every level of decision making in the drive to boost food production. The BBC joined in, The Archers a handy propaganda tool for agricultural lobbying. What was good for farming was good for the nation. Where nature stood in the way of progress, science was enlisted, the upsides lauded and the downsides ignored. Intensive agriculture, the please-all, cure-all of the time, required chemical intervention, and so it arrived in 1955.

It was the simplest of desires that caused the first problems; the wish to protect newly sown corn from pests for better germination rates. Coated with an organochlorine pesticide, the effects were almost instant – wheat and barley thrived, bringing marginal arable land into production and boosting yields. The trouble is, fields don’t exist in a vacuum. Wood pigeons and songbirds eagerly scratch out the newly planted seed from the ground, consuming it in quantity. They were the first to die, killed by direct ingestion. Next up were the species that died from eating the dead. Foxes and barn owls were hit hard, but it was the dramatic decline of the peregrine population that sounded alarm bells in 1956. The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) started to investigate the avian deaths, fingers were pointed but there was unstoppable momentum behind the use of organochlorines.

They were used in a multiplicity of ways that spread them into nature’s food chain: sheep dips, bulb dressing, orchard sprays, timber preservative, moth-proofing fabrics and carpet-making, to pick a few. It might seem a long step from those processes to killing a top predator like an otter, but when you consider, for instance, that great rug weavers like Wilton built their factories by rivers for water and for waste disposal in an era when environmental legislation was all but non-existent, then the connection comes into focus. So, as the invisible fingers of pollution touched just about every river (sheep dips were particularly pernicious in this respect), the problem turned into the unknown crisis, with nobody really noticing through a combination of bad luck, the secret nature of the otter life, the delayed effect of the poison and inaction. The bad luck came in the form of a report published in 1957 but based on data from 1952. Why there was a five-year delay I have no idea (though conspiracy theorists might), but it concluded that the otter population was doing fine. With the birds to worry about, nobody gave much more thought to otters and, being such secret animals, few had any real idea what was happening to the population as the insidious chemicals did their worst. This is how it happened.

Being top of the food chain is all very well, but the implication is that you prey upon everything below you. That’s fine just so long as your favourite foods – eels and fish, in the case of otters – are good to eat. By the early 1960s this was far from being the case. Eels, which live for 10–20 years in ponds, were absorbing the organochlorines into their bodies at a rate of knots from a diet of similarly affected grubs, earthworms and insects. The same thing was happening with fish from their diet of invertebrates: nymphs, snails and all those other bugs you find in a river. But the chemical pass-the-parcel wasn’t killing outright the otters or the things they ate. There were no corpses littering the river bank – if there were, things might have turned out differently. No, otters were hit hard because, with little body fat to act as a buffer like, say, in the eels, the sub-lethal poisoning went straight to the reproduction organs, slowly rendering the population infertile. Otters were not dying, they were dying out.

It is a hard case to make from an emotional standpoint, but it was otter hunts that were the greatest guardians of Lutra lutra during this time. They had a vested interest, that was true, but nobody was closer to the lives of the otter. It is counter-intuitive, I know, but when it came to habitat protection and preventing uncontrolled extermination, the hunts were the otters’ best friend. One hunt in Dumfriesshire even went to the lengths of importing otters from Norway for reintroduction into the wild after a localised population crash. By the early 1960s the declining population was more than just a local occurrence; packs up and down the country were reporting fewer and fewer otters. Some packs closed down. Others hunted mink instead. The remainder changed their method of hunting, reducing the kills from 50 per cent of all otters chased to 15 per cent, limiting, as far as it was possible, those kills to old or sick otters. By the time otter hunting was finally banned as part of an Act of Parliament that gave the animals protected status in 1978, the fifteen otter packs that remained were killing just 150 otters a year between them.

The threat of extinction was never just from hunting, but as the news of the otter decline filtered through to the wider population during the 60s and early 70s this was what took the brunt of the blame, as the anti-hunting lobby gained a voice. Other voices called for investigations, and reports were duly produced. Water quality, habitat destruction, disturbance through human activity and even the lowly mink were the four reasons generally cited for the decline of otters, but rarely was the systemic poisoning given the prominence we now know it deserved.

However much it was wrong, it was hardly surprising that mink took part of the rap; a non-native species first imported in the 1920s, it had adapted to life in Britain pretty well, the population gradually expanding over time, with regular boosts from escapees from mink farms. The European mink, Mustela lutreola, are, as the second half of their Latin name suggests, related to otters, part of the mustelid family. They are more gregarious than their larger cousin (they are about one-third of the size), and you are far more likely to see a mink than an otter as they are less wary of people, preferring to be out and about during the day. The mink were blamed because nature abhors a vacuum. As the otters disappeared, the mink expanded into the vacant space, people assuming that the mink, with a reputation for being vicious, had 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 before hauling up and on the way again. It was an almost daily occurrence and Kuschta would listen out for it; as we’ll discover deer were her unwitting eel finders – an essential staple in the diet of an otter.

But if the eels, however accidentally uncovered, were the regular gift of nature, the manna from heaven was provided by me in the form of the trout lake at The Mill. No emaciated trout here, every one of them nourished daily with pellets, a true living larder. A popular winter venue, I’m always surprised Kuschta doesn’t visit it more often during the worst of times. It is only a mile or two from The Badlands so, as far as I can tell, far from being on the extreme edge of her territory. She could pretty well visit every night if she chose to, but despite the abundance of easy prey, she doesn’t. I often wonder why. It is said otters have a higher level of common sense than most other animals when it comes to their food sources, hunting in such a way that allows the population to regenerate rather than wiping it out. It sort of comes back to one of the multiple purposes of sprainting, an otter quality mark telling of what was caught where and when, providing a sort of self-regulation. But if I shared with Kuschta the truth – that I restock the lake to replace all the trout she takes – maybe she would alter her behaviour.

As it is, I’d estimate the visits are a bit more than every other day at this time of year. In my early years at the mill these losses used to annoy me; the fish corpses along the bank both a financial and emotional loss. I like fish as much as I do otters, but then I read a simple quote by I can’t remember who: ‘otters are rare, fish are common’. For some reason it struck a chord, and since then, though Kuschta’s pillage doesn’t exactly fill my heart with joy, I’ve accepted it as a price worth paying for the sight of a beautiful creature. That said, it doesn’t stop me sending a few choice curses her way when I see a fish with half a tail or a lacerated side.

In the winter she arrives at the lake early, and that always takes me by surprise. It shouldn’t really. My ‘early’ is judged against the human definition of nocturnal, let’s say 9pm to 6am, whereas hers runs from sunset – 4pm at the winter solstice – to sunrise at 8am. You’d think that those sixteen hours would be a massive opportunity for her to travel far, but otters are not active through every hour of darkness. They tend to pack the most into the first two or three hours, resting for the remainder until the last hour before dawn when they get busy again. It is not what you’d expect, but it is sometimes easier to find otters in winter than summer; it certainly does not involve all-night vigils. I’ll see Kuschta dive for cover as I nip out to catch the last post, or I’ll hear that tell-tale splash as I flick on the office lights to combat the gloom. If I’m out before sunrise for my morning checks of the river hatches we’ll often come face to face. The best is when she has a fish to eat. While she is intent on that, I will generally see her (the dreadful noise of her tearing apart the fish is always the giveaway) before she sees me. I can’t help myself, but I always creep up as close as I can. I guess I should circle around and leave her be, but the draw is too much. And the denouement is always worth it because when she finally sees me I can see in her expression a conflict of choices. Should she run and leave the fish, should she run with the fish, or should she stay put? It is mostly the first, straight into the lake. It is never the second, but very occasionally, mostly when she is blinded by wind and rain, it is the third. Whether it is bravery or the simple fact that she does not see me, I cannot judge, but I’ll do my bit, backing slowly away to leave her to it.

February did not disappoint. I always expect it to be the bleakest month of the year and this one proved to be equal to its fellows. There are no hints of spring, no harking back to the glories of autumn. Every day is the relentless winter. The landscape oozes cold and damp. But for all the deprivations, Kuschta was surviving well. As she passed her second birthday she was strong, fit and mistress of her domain. The valley was her place, providing all the shelter and food she needed as she ranged along its length. Naturally some days or weeks were better than others, but ultimately she only had herself to sustain in this solitary life. Strange though this might be, her whole life was predicated around the concept of being alone. She knew, of course, that she wasn’t, because as food became scarcer the more other otters passed through the valley, but she’d do everything she could to avoid contact. She’d sniff at the spraints of uninvited visitors before trumping them with her mark. She’d constantly patrol what she regarded as the core of her territory to ward off incomers. She had no curiosity to meet others and they had no curiosity to meet her. It is a great system, barring one thing – procreation.

Early March was not appreciably different to the month it left behind but for one thing – a scent. Kuschta picked it out from the air; the particular odour of a very particular stranger. In itself that wasn’t unusual, but this spoke to something deep inside her. Her first instinct was to double down on her territorial marking, but this time she paused, the particular dry muskiness percolating into a part of her brain that made her excited rather than fearful. Intrigued rather than dismissive. Curious, in fact. For a while she followed the trail, as it took her to higher ground, well away from anywhere she had been before. Eventually the unfamiliar landscape began to trouble her, so she turned back to home. As she slipped into the comforting embrace of her Badlands, bedding down in the dry shelter under one of the old brick culverts that harked back to the days when the water meadows operated, she was unsettled. For the first time since she had been abandoned by her mother, she felt the need to meet another otter. It was a need that was both visceral and strange, not least because it was that one particular otter. She wanted to ignore the urgings, but deep inside her something was changing that would never change back. She knew she must find this otter. But in truth, Mion was going to find her soon enough.