Encounters with otters

Tweet

I love Mull.It's official. After nearly fifteen years of Highland visits I discovered Mull only three years ago. It has everything that Scotland has to offer, plus the widest variety of wildlife compressed into one relatively small island. When the weather is good you cannot beat it.

Last time I came with the express intention of seeing otters. This, apart from the briefest glimpse from my B&B window, I spectacularly failed to do. This time I decided not even to try. Consequently of course I have seen at least one otter every day. On Wednesday I spent over an hour watching a mother and two cubs fishing, playing and resting on the far bank of a loch. They were too far away for a photo, but great to watch. As I did so another otter emerged on the seaweed about fifteen yards from me affording me my first decent photo of an otter in the wild. I wasn't expecting it to get much better than that.

On Friday in the company of an otter-mad family from Yorkshire we found two more in nearly the same place. A stealthy slither across the seaweed covered rocks put us about twenty-five yards from these. As we settled down to watch, a car went by on the road behind us and one of the otters looked up to see what was going on. Right down the lens of my camera. Fortunately he did not see us.

After a short fishing expedition, the pair hauled up on the other side of us and afforded us another excellent view.

This, and several other unexpected otter encounters, have made this perhaps one of the most exciting wildlife holidays ever. In my personal 'top trumps'of British wildlife a wild otter beats almost anything else...