River Otter Portrait

River Otter Portrait (watercolour 8 x 5 in.)  Available as print

I have always loved Otters. I love everything about them, but I have not been privileged to have close contact with them except as elusive neighbours of the Kemptville Creek Watershed in Grenville County, Ontario.

At Mudpuppy Night in Oxford Mills we often find pairs of leaping prints with tail drag marks in the snow, and belly tracks where they've slid down the bank. We've followed their tracks to and from holes in the ice above the dam  - and once we found the gnawed shell of a Painted Turtle that they'd evidently been playing with on the icy bank below the dam.

But then there was this one, found on 12 April of 2013, 2.8 km northeast of our place in Bishops Mills, on the shoulder of County Rd 18, where she had miscalculated the speed of a car. We brought the body home, took many photos of it as reference for a painting, as the eye was still fresh and bright, and then prepared it as a museum specimen - the best we could do to minimize the waste of life.

Sometimes the only contact we have with wildlife is after its unfortunate demise. I am not going to turn away in dismay at the grim reality of the mortality that our transportation system causes, but always curious, and full of admiration of the beauty and diversity of the forms of nature, I do my best to capture not only the physical aspect and fascinating details of a creature, but to commemorate its individuality. If alive, to record vitality, and if not, then do my best to recreate it, to transfer it to an image that can speak to others of a life well lived.

In the process of creating another 2018 art calendar - this one of detailed watercolour portraits of animals I've handled and admired - found on roads (yes, some were road-killed, but others alive and well) - I found myself in the familiar situation of not having something for December. The Otter I'd photographed in April 2013 would have still had its winter coat, so I decided to finally paint it from the reference photos, and have the Otter stand in for December.

What follows is the history of our interactions with Grenville County Otters, as recorded in the database - observations Fred and I have made through the many years we've lived in Bishops Mills:

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Otters (Lontra canadensis), where they're not trapped out, are the seldom-seen masters of Ontario streams, usually feeding on medium-size fish and Crayfish, but capriciously varying their diet with mussels, Muskrats, Snapping Turtles, Dragonfly nymphs, Beavers, Frogs, and Ducks. Most of their movements follow streams, and don't expose them to road mortality, but they do occasionally take loping overland excursions. We most often see Otter sign in the winter at the Kemptville Creek dam in Oxford Mills, where they run or belly-slide across the snow in getting around the dam.

Our first local Otters were carcasses of two animals trapped in swamps along Kemptville Creek, in the vicinity of Bishops Mills by Denis Tousaw in the winter of 1984-1985, which we prepared as skeletons for the Canadian Museum of Nature (CMNMA 75534 & 75542). Our first direct local observation was tracks Fred saw on 7 February 1997 on Middle Creek upstream of Bishops Mills: fresh tracks & older scat at the edge of open water at an old Beaver dam. The Otter came out of the water, rolled around, sniffed at scats covered by a recent 1 cm of snow, and then evidently went back into the water; it had probably come out to cross the dam. Tracks running along the creek upstream and downstream from here, in old snow, were likely this species.

Then on 27 February 2000, on melting ice on the South Branch SW of Garretton. we saw four Otters. When we first saw these from Branch Road, a large one and two smaller ones were on the irregularly corroded clear mid creek ice, close to the N shore. One was eating what looked like a 15 cm fish, and the others were coming up, periscope-necked, beside it chewing on some small prey that did not protrude from the mouth. We could clearly hear see their flat heads and small ears, and hear soft hissing snorts and bird-like chirps. Then they went over to the other side of the creek, rolling into the water like seals, and the number of smaller ones increased to three. As we left, they were all out on the ice in a clump, watching us and listening to our imitations of their calls. <>

On 13 January 2001 there were tracks in snow around a 20 cm hole in ice just above he Bishops Mills, Middle Creek bridge. On 12 March 2001 in the Limerick Wetland: a Salix/bog shrub wetland, with scattered Black Spruce/Larix/Thuja. Fred and Brenda Carter saw an old trackway that came out of the wetland, up onto a Beaver lodge, which was adorned with a fishy-smelling scat and urine-stain, and then proceeded back the way it came. 

 On 30 January 2003 there were Otter tracks around a place on Kemptville Creek near Hutchins Corners. where a spring seepage into the marshy creek through Soft Maple/Ash woods where the oxygen in the spring's water had attracted roiling masses of Pumpkinseeds, other fish, tadpoles, and Corixidae - http://pinicola.ca/robincrk.htm 

Tracks were again seen here on a visit on 26 February 2003. On 9 April 2005 we had our first on-road observation, when a small Otter ran across the Limerick Road bridge of the South Branch of the creek down to to the water.

On 27 July 2008, along the St-Lawrence River SW of Maitland' in a Willow-overhung forested shore, with a 25 cm surf from the S wind beating against the detritus-drifted shore, we found scales and droppings that were left – probably by an Otter – of some big fish on the horizontal trunk of one of the Willow trees. This reminded us of big gravid Carp that have been found by South Nation Conservation staff with their ovaries eaten out by Otters.

The illustrated individual was found dead on the County Road 18 on 12 April 2013 2.8 km NNE Bishops Mills where a road embankment nips off the corner of a creekside wetland, and the culvert draining it is a narrow dark pipe which no Otter would enter. It was apparently female, not pregnant, with massive trauma in the lower back.

In the past two years we've had a cluster of sightings suggesting local populations are doing well. On 6 March 2016 larger and smaller trackways in snow on broken ice upstream of the County Road 15 bridge over the South Nation River south of Algonquin. On 29 January 2017 on the South Branch along Branch Road, SW of Garretton, an adult was right out on ice near a hole in otherwise complete ice cover. On 25 April 2017 near the confluence of the branches of the creek NNE of Bishops Mills an adult was HEADING:ENE at a gallop across a harvested cornfield. It could plausibly be regarded as having decided to run 500 m rather than swimming twice as far, but at an increased danger of becoming roadkill. And on 22 June 2017 while listening at our South Branch/Limerick Road auditory station, Fred heard . snuffly noises from creek which could most plausibly be credited to nocturnally active Otters who were disturbed by his lights.

It's been at the Oxford Mills Dam during our weekly Mudpuppy Nights in Oxford Mills -(http://pinicola.ca/mudpup1.htm) that we've gathered the most records of Otters, though these are all tracks, and we haven't seen any live animals. Most records are of tracks running around the longer southwest end of the dam, and through a brushy woods to the creek below the dam : 2000-2001 (2 & 23 March); 2001-2002 (8 March); 2003-2004 (16 Jan,18 & 27 Feb) 2004-2005 (21 Jan); 2006-2007 (16 March, tracks on NE side); 2007-2008 (25 & 26 Jan, 4 & 29 Feb, &14 March); 2008-2009: 21 Nov, 12 & 20 Dec, 2 & 6 Feb; 2009-2010: 4 & 26 Feb; 2010-2011: 17 & 26 Dec (only above the dam), 14 & 30 Jan, 3 March 2011; 2013-2014: 14 March (central spillway) & 5 April; 2015-2016: 19 Dec, 1 Jan, & 11 March; 2016-2017:16, 23, & 30 Dec, 4 Jan, 17 & 23 Feb, 17 March (NE side), 30 March. So there were about equal numbers of records in the months through the winter (November, 1 record; December, 8; January, 8; February, 10; March, 10; April, 1).

The account from 20 December 2008 is typical: “Just above the Vantage Point, there was one smooth Otter trackway groove in the powdery snow, coming over the dam on its extreme west end, right along below the dam, and into the open water. Above the dam (which was uniformly smoothly snow-covered, with no other Mammal tracks), the Otter had come along the west shore for as far upstream as we could see – which was only about 70 m. it may have come out of a hole in the ice along the shore there, or have run on the surface from further upstream.”

Some of the different sorts of observations were:

6 December 2002, above the dam “1 trackway, near the eastern spillway, only a couple of metres out over the ice. The pond is frozen over completely, with, except for this trackway, a thin virgin cover of snow.” 19 December 2003, “sliding trackways in snow on ice above & below dam on SW side. The impoundment above the dam was unbroken snow (10 cm deep), except for a couple of somewhat snowed-in Otter trackways along the west side: shallow 20 cm wide grooves, with foot-push marks separated by 40 and 120 cm (approximately), in each 'stride. ' These led to the open water above the west spillway - as if the Otters ran, rather than portaged around, the spillway. There were more tracks below the dam with one slide-way entering the water just below the spillway, and the other at the Vantage Point ledge (where there was now only a wash of water, suggesting that the water level was higher when the Otters were here).” 4 February 2008: “Trackways from below dam, up SW spillway & around spillway above dam. One trackway comes out of the creek above the Vantage Point ledge, and then right up the snow-covered spillway, which is bridged with ice. Above the dam there's a scrabble of tracks around a "gnawed hole" SW of the SW spillway, and a small hole on the NE side of the SW spillway. This confirms our suspicion that the Otters will go right up the 2m spillways. 6 February 2009: “..at 22h12, the Moon was brilliant right at the zenith, and I checked above the dam. The shallow snow on the pond was veined with wandering Otter tracks heading up from the dam (a little silly looking with their narrow trace and big feet close together, but that's what they have to do when they walk), and there were slides down the snow-covered spillways as well.

And finally, this summer, 17 July 2017, we missed the opportunity to get information about the Otters' diet when Fred didn't have a bag when he saw piles of Otter scats on the SW shore where they come down to the creek below the dam in the winter. Our only indication of feeding here was on 22 January 2010 when there was the bitten-off head of a Brown Bullhead in the water on the SW side of the creek.