Walking alongside the river Wharfe one morning, I was heading toward some photography/wildlife locations that I visit from time to time. At one point I stopped to look across to the other bank, where there is an Otter holt. To my surprise, this happened to coincide with an Otter emerging (see photograph). I briskly carried on down the footpath – only stopping when I was some distance downstream. From my new location I still had a view of activity in the river, but I was out of sight of the Otter and the entrance to the holt. Aside from not wanting to disturb or alarm it, Otters are protected by law, and it is illegal to prevent them from accessing or leaving places of rest. We all need to be careful.

After a minute or so, I could just make out the silhouettes of three otters, of varied sizes, entering the river. I think this was a mother and two cubs. Initially they headed upstream, away from where I was now sitting (those are the breaks, sometimes!). However, they soon separated. The two cubs carried on a little further. From an occasional distant glimpse through foliage (all I could manage without moving around too much), I suspected they were playfighting and generally seeing what mischief they could find, but I think there is also a couch/hover that they use in that area, where they are out of the water and yet also out of sight. Fortunately for me, the mother headed back in my direction and began feeding in the river.

She was repeatedly diving in mid-stream, submerging for perhaps 15 or 20 seconds each time, before surfacing close to her starting point. Given the conditions, I would guess that the river was perhaps three feet deep in that location. Quite often she was successful and returned to the surface with something to eat. However, she was too far away for me, with my ‘naked eye’, to see what that might be. Fortunately, my photographs revealed the prey was mostly Crayfish – although on at least one occasion she caught a small fish.

Generally, everything was consumed in the water but, on one occasion, she surfaced and headed directly to the far river bank. I assumed that she would be landing a large fish but, no, it was a large crayfish. So, perhaps unsurprisingly, this is consistent with Otters dealing with small and medium sized prey (both crayfish and fish) in the water, but heading to dry land to deal with any larger prey.