Michael Wright: A staring contest with three river otters

They had me outnumbered.

I was on the banks of the Clearwater River, holding a spey rod. In the river, maybe 20 feet away and staring me down with their beady little eyes, were three river otters.

Somebody was going to have to move along.

It all started around 6 a.m. last Sunday, the sun still below the canyon walls. Two days in a row I had managed to be the first angler on that run, which everyone seems to know as a good place to find fish. I started cast-swing-stepping my way downstream, eyeing a submerged rock that seemed like the perfect place for an anadromous fish to rest.

I heard splashing and looked upstream. About 100 yards away, the otters were rolling and diving in the middle of the river. They were really putting on a show. Occasionally they stayed underwater for a spell and then poked their little weasel heads above the water, like a periscope.

Peace seemed assured at first. They could go upstream, I could go downstream. No big deal. I kept fishing.

Then I noticed they were getting closer, and that they were floating right at me.

Otters are not known to be especially vicious, but you hear stories from time to time of someone getting bit or dragged into the water. The recipe for such an injury – like virtually any wildlife-related mishap – is as simple as being too close.

I backed out of the water. Not long after that, they were treading water right where I had been standing, their eyes locked on me.

I thought about leaving, but did not. A lot of good water was still available downstream, and I wanted to see what these furbearers were going to do.

Encounters like these happen from time to time, said Cory Mosby, a Boise-based biologist with the Idaho Department of Fish and Game who used to work specifically on furbearers like otters.

He has a few otter stories of his own. While fishing on the South Fork of the Boise River, he heard one sneeze, and then watched it swim closer to him. Another time, while duck hunting, otters approached his decoys and bumped one of them.

“When the duck didn’t fly off, they were like ‘what’s going on?’ ” Mosby said. “Once they had assumed these floaty duck things were not ducks, they used them like buoys and slalomed through them and chased each other.”

He said that when they approach people, it is likely not because they want to fight. They are just curious.

“I think it’s mostly they’re not inherently terrified of people, and they’re going to come and investigate,” Mosby said.

Idaho has a decent number of river otters, though Mosby is hesitant to put any actual number to their population. What he can say is that they are widespread and that the population is stable – enough so that the state allows trappers to target them.

Idaho Fish and Game has been working recently on an occupancy survey around the state. The survey involves looking for otter sign along 12-kilometer stretches of river in each of the state’s administrative regions. Mosby expects results to be finalized in the coming weeks, but he said the initial results so far show that otters are basically everywhere the state expects them to be.

That seems to have been the case for decades, despite the species’ struggles in other states. Over the past 40 years or so, otters have been reintroduced and restored in states where they were pushed to the brink of extinction. Idaho, however, never lost its otters and even contributed animals to other states’ reintroduction efforts.

They are an adaptable species. Habitat-wise, they need a body of water and something to eat, and they’re not picky. Carp, catfish, crayfish, muskrats and small ducks are all on the menu, and that is far from the end of the list.

For the most part, the webbed-footed beasts are solitary animals. Mosby said sometimes males will group up, or sometimes younger otters will stick with their mothers for an extended period of time. The three that I saw seemed to be about the same size, and Mosby guessed they were a group of males or a mother with two daughters that had been born in the spring.

As for what they were doing porpoising through the river, he said it is hard to say.

Whatever they were, they eventually tired of staring at me and went back to their morning aerobics. They moved directly behind the rock I had been fishing toward and played there, porpoising in the same spot over and over.

Salmon and steelhead are, of course, edible. According to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, otters are known to follow salmon runs. Chris Donley, the eastern region fish program manager for WDFW, told me that if they stay in one spot it is possible they were harassing a steelhead, and that he has seen them grab a fish and drag it to the bank.

He said that when he sees them while steelhead fishing, he usually leaves. Even if otters do not eat a steelhead, they certainly make them move around. Sometimes that might work in your favor. Sometimes it is the opposite.

After a few minutes, the otters swam away from the rock and headed across the river. Another 100 yards of the run had remained otter-less, and the light still seemed right for catching a fish. I stepped back into the run and started casting, hoping I might end the day with a sense that otters are a good omen.

They are not.

The only fish of the trip came the next day, and it did not require a staring contest.