The Otters are back in Town

Alison Weaver, who has very keen eyes, has recently seen otters in the centre of Witney.

Alison writes: During this year’s very hot summer an island emerged in the Windrush where the river goes under the Witney bridge.

I’ve watched it get bigger and bigger as the summer has gone on. A family of Mallards rested there most nights till the ducklings were half grown. One day a carrion crow, two white pigeons and a wagtail were all hunting around together in the margins.

I always look over the bridge to check if anything is happening amongst the now-tall weeds. On 17 September as I was going home around 10:15pm, I looked over the bridge and directly below me was an otter. It was hunting about on the island; I would guess it was about two feet long. It was calling and being answered by another otter up the river. I watched for a while and then crossed the road to see if I could see the other one, but I couldn’t. When I crossed back the first had gone.

Tony Florey says that an old countryman once told him that there was an otter holt under the bridge in times past.

On 30 October I was going home at 5:45pm and stopped and did my customary inspection of the island. Suddenly I noticed a dark shadow, completely submerged, coming towards me upriver. It hugged the wall of the buildings until it got to the bridge where an otter climbed up the foundations and disappeared – perhaps there is a holt under the bridge!

Alison Weaver, 2 November 2022

John Cobb adds: Unfortunately we don’t have a picture of Alison’s otters but, by a strange coincidence, a day or two after Alison saw her first otter in Witney, I was doing some tidying up with the LWVP volunteers when we discovered some otter spraint underneath one of the hides at Standlake Common reserve. Enormous fences have been erected around a new fishing lake at Standlake – they’re not to keep the fish in but the otters out! There was another blog post by Gavin Hageman about otters – at least their spraint – on the Windrush earlier this year.

Sue and I remember that twenty-eight years ago there was a Club walk at Minster Lovell led by Tim Sykes of BBOWT about a special project to encourage otters to return to the Windrush by the construction of artificial holts etc. As we were leaving someone – Jack Chapman I think – quipped that in a few years time we would come back and see the cubs playing. He wasn’t so wrong, it seeems! (The report of that walk is in the Club’s Newsletter number 60, Autumn 1994.)

Tony Florey, November 2022