Spring 2002 No. 12

Page 6

Target Area 34 : A Video Project

Part 1

Some members may have already seen Clive Martin’s brief but fascinating video footage of a Dorset otter when it appeared on television. It can now be seen on our very own website (see back page for details). In the follow article Clive describes some of his otter monitoring experiences…

OK, I know I am one of the lucky ones…I have otters on my patch, but it wasn’t always that way, and I remember the days of carrying out my surveys for the Dorset Otter Group with nothing to show for my efforts.
Just one smelly little spraint or minuscule tar spot would do!!

If you are one of the DOG surveyors who haven’t been fortunate enough to find spraint, tar spots, or tracks in the mud or snow… take heart, you just never know when your luck will change and a young dog otter will start to transit through or better still take up residence in your target area.

Not all of the waterways I survey have otters on them, Sleep Brook in particular I have high hopes for but no evidence at present [stop press: Clive has now found evidence for otters on this tributary].

My luck changed as far as otters were concerned in April 1999 when at one of my survey sites I found that minuscule tar spot… as it happened it was on a site I thought the most unlikely to yield any evidence of otters. It was a very high profile public site with all the accoutrements that public areas bring such as small boys who wished to cross the river “Tarzan” style other kids with fishing nets, and dogs which hurled themselves from the river banks simply because that’s what dogs do! Anyway this tiny tar spot heralded the return of the otter to the River Crane after some forty years.

Soon I was onto spraint everywhere. Otters love to pooh on an elevation of some sort in a similar way to foxes. It probably enables the scent of its territorial mark to be noticed more readily. I thus obliged the otters by placing, at certain sites, bricks and logs, and the otters would oblige me by a spraint, very often on the same night I placed the brick.
I now wanted to know how many otters where visiting my main site. I call it my main site purely because it has yielded the most evidence either in the form of spraint, tar spots, or often good tracks with webbing clearly visible.

Bronwen had arranged a group meeting at Brooklands Farm in which Paul Chanin was to speak. Paul is well known in otter circles and had written the Mammal Society book on Otters and is carrying out research on DNA sampling at Exeter University. I had hoped that it would be a simple process to ascertain the size of my otter population by using DNA methodology. This process is still somewhat expensive but as time goes on will no doubt become more economical. When it does I have loads of spraint at the ready! Meanwhile I still wanted to get some idea of how many individual otters were on my patch…

It was at this point that Clive decided to attempt to record his local otters on video. The story continues in the next issue.

Clive Martin
Clivemartin@ntlworld.com