By Megan Isadore, Executive Director, River Otter Ecology Project
October 5, 2015
I’m not posting a photo today, because I want to talk about something that can be easy to forget. This morning, my husband and I got up before 7AM and went right out. Yes, it’s Saturday, and we could have slept late. But we would have missed the morning sun out at Kehoe Beach. You know, there’s a cloudy gold that fills the sky just before the fog burns off. We don’t have a fancy camera or a long lens to get great close up photos of wildlife. That leaves us free to look and look and look and fill our hearts with what the world provides. We saw rabbits scuttle off the path, quail with their little bobbing headdresses, the amber flash under a harrier’s wings as she dove, came up and dove over and over, failing to get her prey. We saw the sky travel from gray to brilliant blue, the wind tip the little waves in the lagoon, the peregrine fly westward in hopes of an unwary duck or grebe.
We followed clear traces of river otters along the beach, fresh scat that told us they had been there mere minutes ago! And YES, there they were, mother and pup foraging along the cliffs. We sat quietly while they slept on the beach, asking each other if we dared get closer? We decided against; the baby lay with his little head against his mother’s tail, and when she moved, he moved. Contact, contact! We heard the pup chirp to his mom and watched her lead him/her back back back to their den, far from human traffic. We found birds we don’t know and need to look up in our bird book. We saw a red shafted flicker fly across the lagoon….an unusual bird for that area. We watched the geese fly in formation……it is fall. We took no pictures, we did collect some scat (because we must), but mostly we did something really easy that most of us can do. We went for a walk.
Happy weekend, otter lovers of the world!