Elusive is the word so often applied to these wild creatures. And indeed, you can live for twenty years within a few hundred yards of their homes - holts is the word - and not see them more than a few times. Not unless you want to skulk around their haunts at dusk or dawn. You see their marks: spraints or droppings; you see these same ordures on rocks above water level, with scatterings of crayfish bones in the one part of the river where these abound. But you don't see the otter, with a few exceptions. While Britain was going through a period of great loss of its otter population, numbers held up well here.
It was written recently in the English Field that pesticides caused huge damage in Britain, especially dieldrin introduced in 1955 and banned in 1975 when "the damage was done". It is now a protected animal in Britain and here. The news from Britain is that it is coming back in a big way. One main reason must be the policy of the Otter Trust and other organisations, raising otters and releasing them.
Water pollution was, apparently, one of the causes of the diminution. But, says the Field, brutalisation of river banks by canalisation known as arterial drainage, also has a serious effect. For the otter likes the low, shallow spreading roots of especially ash and sycamore to form the roof of its holts.
Out on western strands and even rocky shores, they seem to thrive. At any rate, Eamonn de Buitlear and Michael Viney and David Cabot, from memory, have given us lovely shots of otters sporting on land and in sea. There is a chapter in that hilarious book Maxwell's Wild Sports of the West, about a time when otter skins were precious. A golden guinea, old Antony, the otter hunter get for one hide. And frequently he would bring thirty to Limerick to sell. In a few years he acquired "a considerable property" so good was the trade. But he married a skittish young wife who soon levanted with an English show man.
The writer was a former soldier, who later took the cloth and got a `living' with no congregation but a wealth of game. Up to recent times, otters could be seen lying on rocks in the Dodder just below Pearse Bridge on the way to Rathfarnham, just basking.
And now a British naturalist muses on the idea of helping to restock France, which has a few, and Holland, Belgium, Ger many and Italy which have virtually none.