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Otter In The Village

My daughter and I had our 'weird sighting' involving an otter.

Driving along late at night and 'something' ran across the road in front of the car. Big, much bigger than a stoat or a ferret, but running in a similar way and the incongruity was slightly scary. We just sat for a moment until I said 'did you see that? What the hell WAS it?'
She said 'I think it was an otter, I saw the tail.' On a rural back lane in North Yorkshire.

Later found out that they routinely raid the fish farm about a mile away, using the dykes and ditches to avoid the roads. I had no idea! And I know what an otter looks like, of course I do. But in the dark, unexpectedly and not where I knew otters to be - it was weird.

And no, Maximus, it still wasn't you.
 
Otters are all over these days.

And they are good at hiding.

When they want to.

Then they pop out on you.
 
Something to carp about.

Footage of an otter attacking koi carp fish in a garden pond has emerged as a rare sighting of the creature in the New Forest.

Neighbours of Tony Stride filmed the otter through a window as it raided the pond at his New Forest home, near Ashurst, killing about 10 fish.

Naturalist Prof Russell Wyne said it was "amazing" to see an otter hunting in the daylight.

Mr Stride said he had "mixed emotions" but planned to restock the pond.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-hampshire-63192608
 
Escapes otterly unharmed.

An otter seen perching inside the engine compartment of a car has escaped unharmed.

North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service said it received a call to a house in Tadcaster at about 09:00 BST on Monday. Officers worked with the RSPCA to try and capture the otter, which measured about 2ft (60cm) in length. However, the animal eventually escaped from the vehicle and ran off into a nearby field, according to the RSPCA.

The charity said the otter had been seen inside the engine compartment and fire crews had placed a tarpaulin around the car to stop it running into the main road. However, the animal proved elusive to catch.

RSPCA animal rescue officer Emmeline Myall said: "I had a collection basket ready to bring the otter in, but the animal moved from sitting on the engine under the bonnet to going underneath the car and then back onto the engine. The otter didn't come out from under the car until it ran off into a nearby field."

Ms Myall said they were told there was a pond in the field and it was thought the animal might have returned to its natural habitat.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-york-north-yorkshire-63383747
 
Do they glow in the dark?

Thriving Otters in North America Linked to Nuclear Weapons Tests. Here's Why.​


When a large earthquake shook Alaska's Aleutian Islands in 2014, scientists with the US government hurried to assess the damage on Amchitka Island. They were looking for leaking radiation from underground nuclear tests performed decades before.

During the first half of the 20th century, the remote island had been a wildlife preserve, until the US government converted it into a nuclear test site.

Three atomic weapons went off at Amchitka in the late 1960s and early 1970s, including the largest underground detonation the US has ever set off.

No humans lived on the island, but the biggest blast, in 1971, killed at least 900 sea otters. The Atomic Energy Commission, the government agency in charge of nuclear research, had predicted at most 240 otters would die.

If ecologists and others hadn't pushed to relocate some otters before the detonation, it probably would have been much worse.

"There was pressure from the state of Alaska as well as environmental groups," conservation biologist and author, Joe Roman told Business Insider. "They ended up moving hundreds of otters."

Roman wrote about the otter relocation in his new book "Eat, Poop, Die: How Animals Make Our World."

https://www.sciencealert.com/thrivi...ica-linked-to-nuclear-weapons-tests-heres-why
 
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