Tracking wild otters in Oxfordshire

I sit writing this with a couple of letters next to me on the table, addressed to local landowners who might -hopefully- allow me to photograph otters from the riverbanks of their land.  It is the week before Christmas and I am allowing myself some optimism that these letters, or at least one letter, will pave the way for some new year opportunities.

I would love to have a local spot to see otters.  But it has been a bit of a challenge- specifically because I live in Oxfordshire, not Scotland, and otters here are only infrequently seen; which is not to say that otters are never seen, so my choice of challenge is not entirely hopeless.  Otters definitely live here- I have found many a pile of spraint now but in my search for a lovely otter-related photo, I would much rather a photo of said animal rather than its faeces.

There are several problems with trying to photograph otters, I have found. Most pressingly, they are largely nocturnal here, which is different to the way otters of the same species, Lutra lutra, behave on the coast in Scotland. Some river-dwelling otters are habituated to humans and come out in the day, but not in Oxfordshire as far as I know. My approach to this was first just trusting to chance with naive optimism that the more time I spent by the river at dawn overlooking a spot I knew otters frequented, the more my chance of seeing an otter that was more crepuscular than nocturnal in nature. After many mornings doing this with zero success, I am now adopting the strategy of using trail cameras to determine the timings of comings and goings by my ottery friends, and thereby to plan my sitting at a river more wisely.

This project definitely did not start out as a trail camera project- in fact I had thought that a grainy photo would be an inadequate goal and eschewed using one for the first few weeks, but now I would be so very grateful for the trail camera to be successful.  At least that would be starting point for a proper photo.  

I once wrote that otters were semi-mythical for me as I had never (at the time of writing) seen them, the exception being the North American river otters at Slimbridge Wildfowl and Wetland Trust, which I would make a bee-line for whenever I visited. Regarding those in rivers in England, I could be forgiven for starting to think that they are...

A beautiful dawn rainbow over the river where I sat and waited for a mythical otter