Dens, holts and homes

I often came to Beaver Point Pond in 1999 after seeing so much otter activity that April. (Seeing otters once is a good April for me.) I kept seeing otter scats now and then but didn't see an otter again until June 5. And this otter, after doing a little fishing behind the dam, crossed over the dam and showed me where her den was, in a jumble of rocks I call the Porcupine Hotel, because I usually see porcupines there.

But thanks to a new dam the beavers made, a good bit of water backed up flooding the basement of the hotel, if you will, making it a comfortable place for a mother otter to raise her pups. Just to give you a better
idea of the proximity of things, here is a February 12, 2003, photo of the Porcupine Hotel on the right with the ridge of Beaver Point Pond where I saw the otters in April 1999 in the back ground left side of the photo. Note the nice otter slides in
the snow.

Anyway, back to June 5, 1999, I saw an otter mother go back to her den in the Porcupine Hotel, or so I think.

Of course I kept nosing around the Porcupine Hotel and finally on June 30, I got a reaction. An otter snorted from down under the rocks. I could see her nose.

Now, I can't prove all this. I am not a scientist, and don't believe in many of the methods scientists use to track animals. Attaching or implanting a radio in otters risks traumatizing the otters, and I see no
reason why trauma in animals shouldn't have long term affects on their behavior just as it can in humans. Indeed, after I see otters in a pond, especially if I know that they noticed me, I don't go back there the next day. I really don't think doing so
would scare the otters, as the video clips on page one show, otters don't scare easily. But I think seeing me again and again might bore them and, I assume, bored otters move on, just like bored humans. I do have a video record of otters covering ten years. While I don't know the life history of any of the otters I've watched, because I went out looking for them about every other day, I have a good grasp of
how the otters used the ponds, used this portion of their territory.

But couldn't I have been seeing and hearing some lonely old bachelor otter? Maybe. I can't analyze the DNA of scat, which is rather difficult to do even if you have the equipment. I once helped a group of Rochester
Institute Technology students collect nice heaps of otter scats, and their analysis only showed the DNA of... fish. So I have to rely on what I see next to explain what I saw before: seeing the lone otter go into an excellent den for raising pups proved to me that the otter on the bank screeching at another
otter was a female protecting pups. Hearing the snorting from that excellent den helped confirm that. What I saw on July 21 proved it again, for I saw what looked very much like a mother otter swimming from Beaver Point Pond into the next pond up,
Otter Hole Pond, looking for and finding her two pups.

One winter when the water level in this pond was slow, I had my wife take a photo of me standing in front of this jumble of granite along the shore of Otter Hole Pond that the otters use as a den.

And then I stuck a camera in a gap going back into the rocks and photographed a ledge that with a bit of grass spread about might make a comfortable spot for an otter.

Now back the otter mother looking for her pups. The first part of the video clip below shows her swimming up Otter Hole Pond and chirping, the way mother and pups often communicate, as she swims into a den in the rocks below where I am standing. Then I heard a rush of water below, and was sure she had come out, but didn't see her. Swimming under the water, otters can be very fast. I scanned the grasses and flooded bushes out in the pond, and in perhaps
another minute, I saw two otters swim out. One was large, the mother, who I saw swim into the den and didn't see swim out. The other was her pup. They swam to the beaver lodge in the middle of the pond. Mom snorted and kept looking around and then another pup popped out of the duckweed around the beaver lodge. Then they swam back to Beaver Point Pond through a hole in the dam.

How gently the mother nuzzles her pups (we'll see a lot more of that) as she leads them back to Beaver Point Pond where they were raised and probably born, if I am right about my interpretation of that April encounter between the two otters on the bank. But that raises another question: if the pups were already born by April 21, why was she up on the bank of the pond and not with her pups in the safety of the rocky confines of the Porcupine Hotel? Especially since males of many species have a reputation of doing harm against newborns, or being too rough with them? Again, I think that's why the mother screeched, to keep the male away to protect the little pups then a few weeks old. However, they were not likely in the watery Porcupine Hotel where they might drown. In the first few weeks of their life, otter pups can't swim. So the first den the mother uses is often dry, perhaps in a tree trunk near the pond.

Not that I've ever found just born otter pups in a tree trunk. However, as I will explain later, I have noticed that mothers like to bring pups back to their old dens. What better way to begin to show young otters the
story of who and where they are. I think that is how she begins to explain to them what their territory is -- with pups it does sound better if you call it a home range. On August 11, 2003, in the East Trail Pond, I saw pups leave the pond, where their mother was swimming, and go up and into a pine trunk. They came back out
when she called them.

I admit this is describing the life story of otters somewhat indirectly. Seeing two otter pups go back to a pine log off another pond doesn't prove that two pups in 1999 were born in a hollow log on the shores of
Beaver Point Pond!

So if the male otter was not needed nor wanted by his mate and wasn't hanging around Beaver Point Pond and the Porcupine Hotel in May, June and July, what was he doing?

How Otters Define Territory

Here is a male otter with his mind on his business, which, on April 21, 1999, was marking part of his territory, a four year old beaver pond that I called Beaver Point Pond. This time we see him leave his mark, poop, which some call scat and others call spraint. At the bottom of this page I'll describe scats and briefly describe where otters generally scat. But the first question is: how do I know this otter was a male and was marking his territory? And if I am right about that, what is his territory?

Adult male otters can be up to 17% bigger than females, or so a study of Montana otters found, see Melquist and Hornocker "Ecology of River Otters in West Central Montana." This struck me as a large otter. Also, as I'll explain below, by this time in the Spring many female otters have just had their pups, and would not look as carefree as this otter did, in my opinion. I have a video clip of what I think is a female otter scating at dawn on an April morning, another year and another pond, which I'll share below, but first, what is an otter's territory?

"Territory" might not be the right word. Wildlife biologists also use "home range", and "core area". But I like territory. I see the way that otter stamped his feet. That says territory to me, and here's my rough idea of this otter's territory:

Eel Bay is about two miles across. I think the territory goes quite far down the American channel, at least another four miles down to Brown's Bay to the northeast. Beaver Point Pond, where I saw the otter in the video above, is below the pond marked with a D, which is what I call Otter Hole Pond. Both ponds are now more or less meadows. When this satellite photo was taken Beaver Point Pond didn't exist. The beavers had not built the dam that created the pond.

I am pretty sure this is the territory because of the pattern of otter slides I see in the winter, going from island to island and out to the channel, and from the similarities of the otter scats I've seen around South Bay and around Eel Bay, and because I've seen otters swimming from Grindstone to Picton, half completing the circle that's Eel Bay. As the short video clip below shows, that is quite a different environment than a beaver pond.

I can't prove that the otter glaring at me off Picton Island is the same otter glaring at me in Beaver Point Pond on April 21, 1999. The otter in each video seems to have the same style. At what is called Quarry
Point on Picton Island (100 years ago granite was quarried there and much of it went to build the Museum of Natural History in New York,) otters frequently leave their scat. The photo below, taken from a less frequently used latrine on Murray Island, shows the commanding position of Quarry Point in the distance:

Now, this is what I think an otter's territory means: it's where male otters not related to this male better not make themselves too comfortable as they pass through and this is where the female otters the resident male mates with can raise his offspring with some guaranty that unrelated otters will not move in and compete for the fish, frogs and crayfish that otters here eat. Of course, the territory is also used by the females and offspring of the otter, but for at least half of the year, each mother and her pups will range in their own small corner of the territory and have it mostly to themselves. The map below shows where I've principally tracked otters since 1994 and between April and November the mother and pups I watched probably spent most of their time there.

I've seen evidence that the mother otter is not a passive occupant of her territory, even as she cares for her pups. On September 13, 2004, I saw a mother and pup break off their napping on a lodge on the north bank of Second Swamp Pond to drive away another mother and pup who were coming down the pond from the east.

 

I think this video shows that the invading otters had a nice understanding that they didn't belong because they retreated without any screeching or bluffing. That said, the defending otters seemed to expect as much, as they were none too aggressive and they resumed their nap on the beaver lodge. Other observers suggest that female otters mark and maintain territory just as the males do. I think it is generally held by wildlife biologists that otters respect territory and try to avoid confrontation. Indeed because otters are so well mannered and don't butt heads to the near death, as we've become accustomed to see other animals do in nature films, there seems to be a tendency to discount the importance of territory among otters. The more I watch otters, the more I think their sense of territory is essential to their survival, a point I'll return to later.

But that makes the otters' world sound a bit too orderly. Two days after I saw the male otter scatting on a mossy bank of Beaver Point Pond, I saw, at the same pond, that it is a bit more complicated, since in this
case it was hard to tell if an otter was actively defending territory or merely exploiting it to full advantage. There was a strong wind and as I sat below the dam watching a beaver, I heard screeching coming from the south shore of the pond, from that ridge where I saw the otter scat two days before. I soon saw an otter down on the bank next to the water, and then I saw a splash, heard some more screeching, and then I saw an otter on the bank and another otter in the water swimming away. The otter on the bank kept looking at the pond. The otter in the pond swam to the middle of it, dove, brought up something on a log and nonchalantly gnawed on it. The video clip below shows the brief fight as I saw it, and then a lull as the male otter, I think, makes his slow way to a log out in the pond.

Was the otter on the bank defending territory? or, was the otter in the pond relaxing from a sexual encounter? If the otter was defending territory, it did a poor job of it since that other otter was quite comfortable in the middle of the pond. My guess is that the encounter had something to do with sex.

As I'll try to demonstrate with many video clips on other pages, it takes about nine or ten months to properly raise an otter pup, especially when a mother has the usual number of pups, three. It takes about two months for otter pups to gestate in their mother's womb. So the otter mother is busy year round carrying or raising pups. The best time for animals to be born or hatched, for that matter, is in the spring. That's a nice time to first see the light of day and affords a good six months for the new arrivals to fatten up and prepare for the challenge of winter. To make sure that pups are born around April 1st, in otter mothers, and many other animal mothers for that matter, the implanting of embryos is delayed. That means an otter can have sex without immediate
consequences. The blastocysts that result from successful mating simply float in the uterus until months later they become attached to the uterine wall so they can be nourished and develop. (Or so I read, no videos of this process!)

So that pups are born in April, implantation occurs sometime in late January or early February. Given the mother otter's busy schedule the only window she has for having sex is from that time in February when she separates from her pups until late April. According to Whitaker and Hamilton's Mammals of the Eastern United States, otters can been in heat 42 to 46 days after
bearing their pups. This makes sense because newborn otter pups are rather helpless, can't swim or scoot about, so the mother can take time off from suckling them and get out and find food. So I'm suggesting that on April 23, 1999, a male otter was still inclined to have sex, while a female otter may or may not have been in heat even as she was caring for new born pups.

Screeching is characteristic of otter sex. They are supposed to do it in the water. As I see the video, one otter was always on land. But I had been hearing screeching for a while, but all coming from that shore, not from the pond. Don't ask me why a male otter couldn't figure out that the female was not in the mood. He likely had already mated with that female otter, and, well, perhaps the screeching encounter had some satisfying consequences for him. How else explain why the otter who seemingly had the worse of it along the bank seemed so fat and happy out on that log in the middle of the pond?

So while otters might sort their territory out in orderly fashion, there is no lack of tension within that territory because of the battle of the sexes.

To make this point more clearly, I need to establish that female otters nursing and raising pups have no use for male otters, that no father is needed, other than for that brief encounter that leads to mating. I'll give it a try. At dawn on April 15, 2001, I went out to a pond to watch the beavers, and while I watched the beavers, an otter appeared in the pond, scatted by the dam, did a bit of fishing, saw me and disappeared. But this otter did all that without the cocky demeanor of the otter I saw on April 21, 1999, who is featured in the video clip at the top of this page. I think the otter in the video clip below is a female, a mother getting away briefly from her pups. At the time and when I first studied the video clip, I thought the otter was wary of the beavers nearby. Indeed, as she got back into the pond after scatting she screeched to persuade the beaver to move aside. But maybe she also has an eye out for a touring male otter.

This took place in the East Trail Pond and opens with a beaver slapping its tail. I thought that slap was meant for me. Then an otter swims into view coming from the direction where, I would later determine, an otter mother made a den in a tree trunk to raise her pups. The otter has more beavers to get past and I used to think all her looking up as she swam arose from her concern about the beavers. I have seen several other otter-beaver encounters, and in most, the beaver was the aggressor and the otter or otters in the beaver's sights seemed more put out than alarmed at the attention. This otter, I think, was looking beyond the beavers. You can see that especially when it gets on the shore and looks up the hill at the 1:30 mark. After scatting on the shore -- I couldn't see that and edited it out of the clip -- the otter goes back through the pond not too worried about the beavers even as it gets another tail slap. The otter starts looking around again, but now I think it senses my presence. I love studying this video clip, but will admit what it doesn't prove my point that female otters are shy of males once her pups are born.

I do have a more persuasive clip. It shows a mother hiding her pups and herself from a touring otter, and also involves a beaver. On October 21, 2005, I had watched an otter mother and her two pups fishing in the Second Swamp Pond for about an hour. I had remained undetected and when they went up to the next ponds, I followed. I went up to the Lost Swamp Pond where I didn't see the otters, then I heard a beaver's tail splash and an otter screech down over a slight ridge at a new pond the beavers built above the Second Swamp Pond. When I went over to see what was happening, I saw a beaver swimming back and forth in front of his lodge, but I didn't see any otters. Then a lone otter swam down the pond and went over the dam down to the Second Swamp Pond. The beaver didn't do anything. After that otter left, the mother came out from the beaver's cache of sticks, snarled at the beaver, and resumed fishing with her pups. Here's the video clip:

The lone otter was probably a male, and probably related to the other otters, but the mother simply didn't want to have anything to do with him. Since April she had more or less exclusive use of the ponds and wished the interloper away.

Before leaving this page, I should try to explain some otter fundamentals.

One of the keys to understanding the otter that graces the top of this page, and the life and adventures of his consort and offspring, is to understand what he left behind up on that ridge. After the otter
left, I did take some video of his scat. I didn't carry a camera then, and video is not very dramatic. So let me put in a video of another male otter marking territory, in 2005, in the Lost Swamp Pond.

By 2005 I was taking a digital camera in my camcorder bag and so I got a good photo of what that otter left behind. In the video clip below, taken June 4, 2005, I saw an otter swim quickly through the large pond, only pausing to dive for fish a few times, and then go up on a slope and scratch up grass and scat, perhaps even make a scent mound. He scats like the other otter, then humps about like a crazy cat scratching the grass:

When the otter moved on, I walked over to see what he had left behind. In the photo below you can see where he scratched up grass and left a scat.

What's otter scat like and where do they usually scat? These are valuable things to know if you want to look for otters. Fortunately for otter watchers, what's left behind is easy to identify: loose, usually black, filled with fish scales, even fish parts, and smelly. Here's the scat that 2005 otter left behind, and then three more for your pleasure.

I have hundreds of photos of otter scats, but I've noticed that not many people appreciate otter scats as much as I do. So I'll put a selection of otter scats on another page someday. All otters scat around the ponds, not just males, often in groups and often at the same place. Finding their latrines can be a great help in tracking otters. Not only does it show where otters have been, it can also indicate how recently they've been there. Unlike raccoon scat and deer droppings, otter scats usually age quickly. Good places to look for otter latrines are on rocks beside the pond (as the video clip above demonstrates,) on likely trails into the pond, on beaver dams and, if you can get to them, on beaver lodges.

Sometimes otters seem to make a more formal arrangement, scraping up grass in a mound and crowning it with a scat. I assume they make these in areas significant to the other resident otters, and where they are
likely to be noticed by non-resident interlopers. For example, here is a scent mound

that was on the ridge between the west end of the Lost Swamp Pond and the east end of the Second Swamp Pond.

Otters often make scent mounds

at a latrine high on the north shore of South Bay overlooking the entrance to the bay

Otters can get a bit manic about making scent mounds. In the Spring of 2005, no less than nine scent mounds lined a little causeway that carried a trail over a pipe that brought the water from the Big Pond and the little ponds below it into South Bay.

Out in the St. Lawrence River

You can find otters in rivers of all sizes, canals, lakes, marshes, and bays off the ocean. I watch otters on a large island in the middle of the St. Lawrence River, which is several miles wide where I live. I do see them in the river, for example, off Picton Island at dawn

where in those waters about 6 to 8 feet deep they often get crayfish crawling along the bottom. It's hard to see them and get video or photos of them in that great expanse of water. Here's a poor image of an otter periscoping up out of the water off an old quarry on Picton Island to get a better look at me as I floated by in a kayak.

Under the ice

Otters can flourish anywhere there are fish. At first glance the photo of those three otters in the snow seems to disprove that. That was a cold day and there weren't even snowfleas around. However, the otters were sticking their heads out of a hole in the ice of a pond. Underneath the ice, this is something like what they saw:

and that channel may have led to an area under the ice looking like this (though the camera flash is a luxury otters don't have!)

little pools of water, lightly frozen over, where they could find fish to eat -- and it was probably quite a bit warmer under that ice especially when the sun went down. So otters live in two different worlds, no actually three: the dry one we are familiar with, the under water world and the under ice world. In the latter two they get most of their food. They do need dry land, though. Otters, not just sea otters, can fish many miles out in the ocean but they have to come back to dry land where they can wash off in fresh water, rest, and raise a family.

Otter or Fisher?

Another animal mistaken for an otter is the fisher. It is about the same size but despite its name a fisher doesn't swim in the water. If you happen upon a fisher at the edge of a pond, it will run into the woods, not into the pond. One October morning I saw a fisher coming up from a wet meadow below a big beaver pond. The fisher looked at me and ran into the woods.

Then I went up to the beaver dam and saw a mother otter and her two pups fishing near it and running up on it. When they figured out I was there, they disappeared into the pond, probably swimming out to a beaver lodge along the shore. Fishers, by the way, can climb trees, something otters don't do, though I've seen them climb up on tree trunks angling out of the water, a few feet.

Finally, I'll offer the most important tip for identification. Of all the diving animals, including ducks like mergansers, otters make the most dynamic ripples in a pond when they are diving for fish. A number of otters can bring a pond surface to a boil with ripples.

So when you approach a pond and see the ripples from a dive or splash wait a few seconds. If you see another, and another, and they seem to move every few seconds, then get down and get the binoculars out and look for an animal coming head out with a fish in its mouth or waving a pointed tail high in the air when it dives, and hope you've been trapped by an otter. Enjoy the show.

by Bob Arnebeck

Otter or Muskrat?

Not a few times, I thought I was looking at a big muskrat only to discover, when I looked closely at the video, that I had seen an otter. Muskrats are rodents like beavers though much smaller, half the length of an otter and a fourth of the weight. They can vary their diet, and like otters do eat shellfish, but they usually feast on grasses and I often see them carrying grass in their mouth as they swim across a pond.

The video clip below is a bit long but it shows the persistence of a muskrat when it's time to feed the mother and young back in the den, which in this case was a beaver lodge which the beavers continued to use, and where, come to think of it, I saw otters park themselves on top on several occasions.

Otters rarely carry grass as they swim in a pond. I once saw an otter put some grass up on a beaver lodge to make it a bit more comfortable for a long mid-day nap. So how did I mistake an otter for a muskrat? It's all in the tails. Muskrat tails are not at all like beaver tails, and when a muskrat cocks it in the air, from a distance, it can look like an otter tail, even though an otter's tail is spade-shaped and a muskrat's tail is straight.

Muskrats often hold their tails out of the water which otters also do when they are diving for fish. The first photo below is a muskrat; the second is an otter, almost all the way under water, so I saw the thinner end of its tail.

However, a few times I've looked at the video I took of what I thought was a muskrat only to see that I actually saw an otter. Unlike the beaver, both the otter and muskrat can propel themselves with their tail. So when a small otter is simply swimming through a pond without diving for fish, you might see the tail swishing a little behind it and think it is a muskrat. In the photos below, muskrat first, then otter.

An otter's wake is always bigger and an otter is faster, though a muskrat can sometime rotate its tail fast enough to make like a jet ski! (See my web page on muskrats.) Finally both otters and muskrats have the habit of climbing up on logs floating in a pond. Again, muskrat first, then otter.

The otter has much longer body, but looking through binoculars you can lose perspective. The muskrat is probably marking the log with its musk or poop. The otter is probably looking for fish remains. Often when feeding her pups, mother otters plaster logs in the water with what's left of the fish she's been chewing. Pups don't start catching fish themselves until well into September when they are five months old.

Otter or Beaver?

The other two mammals commonly mistaken for otters are primarily vegetarians.

The beaver pictured above is building up its dam. something you'll never see an otter do. Otters fish around beaver dams, sometime scat on top of them, and sometime dig into them, but they don't carry sticks to a dam. Sometimes they carry clumps of vegetation when they are trying to make a more comfortable place to lie on top of a beaver's lodge. On average beavers and otters are about the same length, but on average the beaver is many pounds heavier: 30 to 70 pounds for adult beavers and 12 to 20 pounds for the adult otter. In the photos below the otter looks heavier but that's because it swims more out of the water, because it is lighter!

Here's a video of a beaver bullying an otter out of its pond. You can see the stolid style of the beaver and the quicksilver style of the otter -- more like a fish.

But its hard for the beaver to hide its big triangle shaped head, bigger ears, and notice that paddle shaped tail, quite unlike an otter's tail shown close-up below.

Over the years I've often initially mistaken beavers for otters, especially when the beavers are diving for roots at the bottom of a pond, for otters. The photo shows the base of a diving beaver's tail.

But in a few moments when the animal came back up to the surface, I saw the beaver's big head and ears and noticed how slow it was. Still, in the evening it can be tricky. Otters dive in the water and often eat the fish they catch by clutching it in their paws while they eat it. Beavers don't just east trees. They dive in ponds and bring up vegetation, soft grasses and such, hold it in their paws and eat it up with their head. But as you'll see in the video below, when they dive you just see the base of the tail, and the head is shaped differently.

On rare occasions an otter will lolligag out in the water floating like a log which is what beavers often do. And beavers can surprise you with their agility in the water, especially if you scare them at the edge of the pond. I did that to a yearling beaver and it swam so fast underwater that it made an impressive wave and wake in the shallow pond.

When a beaver tires of your presence, it often makes a big splash with its tail to try to persuade you to leave it alone.

Otters have a different style. Remember those otters that swam back to get the tailless bullhead that I was so rudely standing over? Their heads soon popped up and they gruffly snorted at me, a noise they make by blowing air through loose lips. Otters don't chatter as much as they do in the sound tracks of the nature films like "Yellowstone Otters." Remember, almost all sound tracks are spliced in later and juiced up to add to the visual excitement. I can watch a group of four otters fishing in a pond for an hour and never hear any noise save the occasional splashing of water.

Otter or Mink?

One afternoon in the fall, I watched two otters fishing in a beaver pond and then I thought they went into a nearby beaver lodge. I noticed that one of the otters left a bullhead fish on the bank across the pond where they often roll around and poop. So I walked around to see what shape the fish was in.

Not good. Then as I was kneeling down studying that, I saw the two otters heading right for me, no doubt, to get that fish. Then they saw me, dove and swam off under water, got near the beaver lodge where they denned and popped up to take a look at me.

In the Middle Ages otters were sometimes categorized as fish, and I can understand a Medieval scholar saying to himself, "here's a four legged critter who likes to eat fish, but unlike a cat, raccoon or bear, it actually swims after the fish! Big fish swim after little fish and eat them, so... an otter is best described as a fish!" And there's something to be said for calling an otter a fish. You almost always find them in or right near water. They almost always disappear into the water, sometimes they fly out of it, just like a fish,

The German word for otter is "fischotter" which is a much more sensible name than "river otter." You can find many an otter not in a river. I usually see them in beaver ponds, and they are found fishing well out in the ocean, anywhere there are fish.

Three other mammals, the mink, beaver, and muskrat, are often seen swimming in ponds and rivers, and all three are often mistaken for otters. Beavers and muskrats have no interest in fish. You won't find them out in the ocean. Minks do eat fish, and up where I live on the St. Lawrence River many people mistake minks, which are much more common here, for otters. Minks are mush smaller, never more than half the size of an otter, 21 inches compared to 43 inches on average, but seen from a boat, or through binoculars, and having no otter around to stand still for comparison.... In the video below, an animal swims along the shore of a bay like an adept hunter of fish, with a lithe body and long tail.

But it's a mink. Even with a fish in its mouth, a mink looks like a mink, not an otter.

Minks eat a lot of things other than fish; whatever might be missing, chickens, snakes, goslings, ducklings, minks are prime suspects. Minks can get into anything. They have rather small heads

and they are prone to stay on shore when they see you, maybe duck under a dock or between rocks, or into a hole, while an otter almost always goes into the water and turns into a fish. Minks also have a bushy tail when its dry, I bet that makes a tail much better for balance and speed when running on land.

and the otter's tail is never bushy. Minks also generally take their catch back to their den, which is what the mink pictured above with the fish did, scurrying along the shore to a dam 50 yards away. An otter usually gets right to work eating a fish. In the video below you can see how it brings a fish up on the ice, eats it, dives down to catch another fish, brings it up and eats it, a real fish eating machine, though more beautiful and elegant than any machine!

Another reason why I think people mistake minks for otters is that minks can look rather playful. Take a look at the video below showing a mink on the ice. Not like that fish devouring otter. The mink romps on the ice in the early spring like it's having fun

Yes, otters play, but generally when they are out of the water, they're busy finding a place to poop. I've never seen a mink poop. Otters make a big production out of it. You'll three tail waving poops in the video below and a good bit of sniffing about. Then the otter gets under the ice for breakfast.

Now let me share a video clip of an animal I first thought was a mink or muskrat, and then as I studied it, I realized that it was a mink -- the big, spade shaped tail that I could see when I made the video brighter convinced me that it was an otter.