Otters And Their Accountants
A river otter, considered economically, is a small business. The business is almost entirely carnivorous, operates principally at dawn and dusk, and is subsidised in winter by a fat layer laid down in the summer from sculpin, crayfish, and the occasional unlucky juvenile coho. The balance sheet is thin. An otter must eat something on the order of fifteen per cent of its body weight each day, which for a seven-kilogram adult female is around a kilogram of wet flesh, which in turn represents a morning of diving — because otters are diving hunters — that is not negotiable with the weather, the hydrology, or the mood.
I have spent more hours than I can honestly account for watching otters on the Stillwater. This is in some sense a confession. My official brief is coho. The otters are an incidental species, in the language of grant proposals, which is the language that controls my working hours. But I have kept incidental sighting cards on the otters since my second year here, and I have become, by accretion and against plan, the closest thing this watershed has to an otter accountant.
The ledger is kept on index cards. Each card has a date, a reach, a count, and — where I am certain of it — an identification. Otters are identifiable, if you are patient, by patterns of scarring on the muzzle, by variations in the pale throat patch, and by a few unmistakable individuals whose