The North American River Otter

By Wiley Wood

The tracks look dog-like, big pugmarks in the snow coming up from the lake, crossing the ski trail and climbing the bank on the far side. But the coyote, if it is one, is dragging something heavy in its mouth, making a long, shallow dent in the snow. The tracks cut across the hillside, the drag marks intermittent, toward a narrow saddle that drops on the far side into the next drainage.

It’s March, a fresh layer of snow has fallen, but it’s warm in the late winter sun, and hollows have formed around the bases of the larger trees.

The otter’s locomotion through the snow is a mixture of bounding and sliding.

The tracks swoop down toward an intermittent stream at the bottom of a wide ravine, the trough in the snow more frequent now. The stream gurgles under a partial covering of ice through the dark hemlocks at the bottom of the hollow. The tracks follow the current, the animal occasionally splashing into the water, then stepping out again onto the ice and snow.

Where the stream deepens before running into a wide, shallow beaver empondment, the tracks disappear altogether. I make a careful circle around the spot. No doubt about it. The animal is aquatic, it has dived under the ice into the deeper water.

I pick up the tracks again below the beaver dam, working west along the shoreline of the frozen pond, realizing now that it must be an otter, running a few steps, then sliding on its belly.

Where the shore swings around to the north, the tracks leave the lake and climb a steep hillside. It’s late and I turn back. But I have a good idea where the otter is heading.

The male otter travels widely in the early spring. It is breeding season, and a male will often mate with several females, though the sexes don’t associate at other times of year.

The otter’s playfulness is linked to its high metabolic rate and carnivorous diet, which includes fish, crayfish, freshwater mussels, salamanders, occasional birds and small mammals, worms and insects. It is prey, in turn, to bear, coyote, bobcat and red fox.

The next day, I strike out through the woods toward a ridgeline west of yesterday’s lake. The tracks show up on cue, laboring up the steep eastern slope and glissading down the far side towards yet another pond.

It turns out that the swooping trough of an otter in spring snow, as the animal travels from drainage to drainage, is a fairly common sight in our woods. Look for it in March.

Photos by Wiley Wood.