Charisma Comeback: After Near-Extinction, Otters Return To Every County In England (From The Independent, August 18, 2011)

Once the rivers were cleaned up,fish returned to once-polluted waters and otters began to spread back eastwardsfrom their strongholds in Devon and Wales

By Michael McCarthy, EnvironmentEditor

Thursday, 18 August 2011

 

           It has taken 30 years, but theotter's comeback is now complete. After becoming extinct across most of Englandin the Fifties and Sixties, one of Britain's best-loved animals has nowreturned to every English county, the Environment Agency announced yesterday. 

          The slow but steady recolonisationof its former haunts has been rounded off with the reappearance of otters inKent, the last county to have been without them, the agency said. 

     The otter's return represents ahappy ending to one of the worst episodes in modern British wildlife history:the sudden disappearance of one of our most widespread and charismatic mammals.

        The process began around 1956 andwas almost certainly caused by the introduction of powerful organochlorinepesticides such as aldrin and dieldrin. Residues of these chemicals were washedinto the rivers where otters lived, poisoning them. 

          As wild otters are hard to spot –their presence is usually detected by their spraints, or droppings – it wasseveral years before the scale of their disappearance began to dawn on people,but by then they had been wiped out over vast areas of lowland England. 

          Despite the banning oforganochlorine pesticides in the mid-Sixties, otters continued to decline, andtheir population reached a low point by the end of the 1970s, when they hadeffectively vanished from everywhere except the West Country and parts of NorthernEngland (although good numbers remained in Wales and Scotland). 

          The first national otter survey,carried out between 1977 and 1979, detected the presence of otters in just over5 per cent of the 2,940 sites surveyed; all the sites were known to have heldthe animals previously. 

          But then a comeback gradually began.Helped by a substantial clean-up of England's rivers, which brought back fishto many once-polluted watercourses, and by legal protection, otters began tospread back eastwards into England from their strongholds in Devon and in areasof the Welsh borders, such as the Wye Valley. 

          By the time of the fourth ottersurvey, carried out between 2000 and 2002, more than 36 per cent of the sitesexamined showed otter traces; and when the fifth survey was carried out,between 2009 and 2010, the figure had risen to nearly 60 per cent, with ottersback in every English county except Kent. Now wildlife experts at theEnvironment Agency have confirmed that there are at least two otters in Kent,which have built their holts on the River Medway and the River Eden. 

          "The recovery of otters fromnear-extinction shows how far we've come in controlling pollution and improvingwater quality," said Alastair Driver, the Environment Agency's NationalConservation Manager. "Rivers in England are the healthiest for over 20years, and otters, salmon and other wildlife are returning to many rivers forthe first time since the industrial revolution. 

      "The fact that otters are nowreturning to Kent is the final piece in the jigsaw for otter recovery inEngland and is a symbol of great success for everybody involved in otterconservation." 

          Otters are at the top of the foodchain, and are therefore an important indicator of river health. The clean-upmeans that they are now inhabiting once-polluted rivers running through cities– something which would have been unthinkable before the population crash – andthey have been detected in places such as Stoke-on-Trent, Reading, Exeter andLeeds, as well as in more likely urban centres, such as Winchester.  

          Although they are now widespreadonce more, otters' nocturnal habits and riverine habitat make them difficult toglimpse, let alone observe, in England. The best place to see otters in Britainis Western Scotland, where the animals have become semi-marine and live alongthe coast. They can regularly be seen foraging along the shoreline in thedaytime, especially on some of the larger islands, such as Mull and Skye.