A near miss on OtterCam

How about this for a close encounter?  I went to change the trail camera cards and batteries with my mate Brian and we stopped to look at a newly-emerged damselfly.  The dog otter must have heard / smelt / seen us and quietly slipped into the water only a few yards away.  We only realised what had happened when I looked at the videos at home.  Frustrating!

The other news is that the otters are courting.  The three cubs have left their mother although I think two of them are still around.

Two days before the picture above the dog went through the same spot whistling for a mate.

And a few hours before we were there the courting couple were caught on camera.  First the male went behind one of the cameras.  A little while later the female followed him and moments later they reappeared.  In her hurry to keep up she bumped into the camera before running ahead into the water and circling round to encourage him.  The chittering noise is one I have heard every year to attract the male but this is not as loud as this time last year.  After a bit of scent-marking and sniffing they went off out of view.

The timing of this is interesting.  This is the fourth May in a row that I have seen courtship behaviour in the otters.  Here is a fairly primitive chart to show what has been happening in the 7+ years that I have been following the otters with trail cameras, starting in February 2019.

You'll see that a pattern has emerged in the last four years with cubs (presumably) born in July - gestation is 63 days - and visible from October/November before dispersing in May as courtship begins.  Otters are non-seasonal breeders but this has settled into an annual cycle.  In the earlier years I didn't have cameras in permanently and hadn't worked out the best place to put them but even so we can see a different pattern.  The courting in February 2022 was well seen on camera but presumably didn't lead to anything as new cubs weren't seen until November that year.

Otters don't usually breed until they are about two years old and I read that the average female only lives long enough to have two or three litters.  However, otters can live for up to eight or nine years in the wild so it is obviously possible for one female to have more.  If a female died or was no longer able to reproduce I would expect there to be a delay while the territory was taken over by a new female so the chart makes me wonder if this female is already six years old and is hoping to embark on her fifth pregnancy.  If so, and if all goes well, we should expect to see new cubs on the cameras in October or November.

One other observation.  None of the three recent cubs ended up larger than their mother so I suspect all three were female.  You'll see above how much larger the male otter is.  A year ago both cubs were male and grew larger than their mother.    This is a video from yesterday and I think it shows two of the cubs still in the territory.  Notice that the first cub has a tick in its left ear whereas neither the dog otter nor the mother had a tick in the video above.  Once the videos show only a solo otter it becomes more difficult to tell who is who.