Tag: gavin maxell

Morning everyone! Surfacing Again is 99c for the whole of this week and I thought I’d share a bit about otters. This is largely an exercise in basking in cuteness for five hundred words, so please do excuse me.

As you know if you’ve met any of my Celtic myth retellings, they are all based on some sort of legend from the westward Celtic fringe of the British Isles. I began by making them Celtic (hence the name, doh!), but I’ve expanded a bit for the sake of a good story and St Cuthbert was actually knocking round Northumbria in the very early middle ages, during the seventh century. His church was part of the Celtic tradition, but he wasn’t a Celt. I made an exception for him because I was so taken by the otter story. (The whole Celtic church versus the Roman church is a whole other post, so we’ll go with this oversimplification because it’s a niche interest 😊)

So. Cuthbert was an extremely austere chap, who used to go and stand in the sea to pray. When he got out, a pair of otters would come out of the sea too, and dry him off. We know this because a creepy stalker-monk spied on him and later told St Bede, who wrote it in his Life of St Cuthbert.

This is…not usual otter behaviour.

Here in the UK we don’t have sea otters. We just have otters, some of whom prefer to hang out on the coast. I like to think of them as water-cats, or maybe water-dogs, because they are so active and playful. They are the European otter, members of the Mustelid family which also includes stoats, weasels and mink. They’re all pretty fearsome creatures with an exciting set of teeth that you don’t want predating in your chicken house.

They are also exceedingly rare in the UK at this point, although I believe they are less rare than they used to be. My sister (to whom Surfacing Again is dedicated) is our local point of contact for one of the otter protection organisations and she does counting and watching. This seems to mostly involve dangerously hanging over bridges and wading through unpleasantly deep streams to change the cards in her wildlife cameras and then watching the footage and logging what she sees. She also counts up footprints and spraint that she finds. Because they are so endangered, people aren’t encouraged to deliberately go and search for them.

I think we have this anthropomorphic idea in our heads about some wild creatures that doesn’t serve us well, simply because they are so charming. Otters fall into this category I guess.

They eat mostly fish, but will also eat birds, mammals and frogs if they’re hungry. Because they’re inquisitive they will interact with humans occasionally in the way they do in Surfacing Again…coming up to see what’s going on. But like all wild animals they aren’t tame and we shouldn’t see them like that. Having said that I loved Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water when I read it in my teens. In my opinion it’s the ultimate otter book. Maxwell lived with a house full of otters on the west coast of Scotland—he was a naturalist who travelled widely in the interwar and post WW2 years and brought his first otter back from Iraq . It was a different time and these days you have to have a licence to keep a wild animal as a pet.

In my story I tried to balance my desire for Mustelid cuteness with my feeling that otters are wild creatures who should be respected. I hope I’ve done that.