Return of the Sea Otter

by Todd McLeish

  When I visited the rescue center on a snowy December day less than two months after Walter’s rescue, the facility was somewhat quiet. While it has at times housed more than one hundred rehabilitating animals at once, that day there were fewer than a dozen, almost all harbor seals. When I first arrived, I found Walter sleeping on a wooden platform at the edge of his eight-foot wide pool. The coffee-colored fur on his head and upper body blended smoothly into the chocolate brown of his lower body, and a quick glance confirmed that his coat was still thick and lush. I would not have guessed that he was injured or sickly in any way.

  As I watched, he slid into the water and began to roll—a behavior Gavin Maxwell described in his classic British memoir Ring of Bright Water as a “pirouette in the horizontal plane, like a chicken on a spit that has gone mad”—before stopping briefly to use both front paws to groom his face in the exact manner that I wash my own face. Then he rolled in the water some more, pulled himself halfway out of the tank and gave himself a quick shake to rid his head of water, then dived back in and began rolling some more. He groomed his belly, moved on to his tail, rubbing it repeatedly with both paws, then returned to his face, ears, and eyes. At times it looked like he was grooming his scalp just like people rub shampoo into their hair.

  This grooming behavior continued for my entire twenty-minute visit, shifting from head to belly to tail and back again, with more rolling in the water in between each grooming cycle. Haulena said that captive sea otters generally do only three things—eat, sleep, and groom. I had by then observed two out of three, and while I didn’t stay long enough to watch Walter being fed, it was apparently a simple and entertaining process. As soon as he heard a caretaker enter his enclosure, Walter asked for food by slapping his chest with his paws. Food was then tossed on his chest as he reclined on his back in the water, and when he finished, he slapped his chest for more. Despite his blindness, Walter learned well how to quickly retrieve any food items that dropped from his chest.

  Although Walter recovered from most of his horrific wounds, it was obvious that he would never be released back into the wild. Haulena said that rehabilitated animals are good candidates for release only if they are not a danger to people or other free-ranging wildlife, if they are free of pain and able to forage on their own, and if they can avoid predators as adeptly as animals that have not gone through rehabilitation. Because of his blindness, Walter failed on the last point. So eleven weeks after his rescue, Walter was put on exhibit at the Vancouver Aquarium alongside three long-term resident otters that had been transferred there from the Alaska SeaLife Center. According to Haulena, Walter was an ideal animal for display because he told an important story about the impact humans have on wildlife, not only the unintentional effects of human activities but, in this case, the intentional harm as well. Sadly, Walter died in his sleep in December 2015

  after two years in captivity. He was believed to have been about fifteen years old when he died, which is the average lifespan of a sea otter in the wild.

  Public reaction to the cause of Walter’s injuries was overwhelming, with justifiably angry comments and wild speculation appearing on social media and in the news. Unfortunately, Walter isn’t the only sea otter that is intentionally harmed by disturbed individuals who apparently find joy in causing senseless injury and death to innocent animals. Jim Curland at Friends of the Sea Otter calls acts of cruelty against sea otters “heinous crimes” that are “incomprehensible to those of us who love animals.” He says that such acts are pretty rare—typically fewer than half a dozen each year are reported in California and less than one a year in British Columbia—but he worries about how many shootings go unreported because the animals are never found.

  “The only way we find out is if they wash up on the beach or they are found floating in the water,” he said. “We hear that some are weighted down so the evidence never surfaces. This kind of violence might happen more often than we know about, especially in more remote areas.”

  Curland points to the sad events of early September 2013, when three male sea otters were shot and found dead along Asilomar State Beach in Pacific Grove, California, on the Monterey peninsula. Two were shot in the head and one was shot in the back with coated lead bullets. The US Fish and Wildlife Service conducted a criminal investigation, but it wasn’t until five months later that it publicized the crime and sought help in finding the perpetrators. A $21,000 reward was offered for information leading to an arrest and conviction, but so far nothing of substance has come of it. But there has been a great deal of speculation about who could do such a thing.

  Most of that speculation focuses on fishermen, who are clearly unhappy with the affect that sea otters have on their ability to make a living. Fishermen appear to be the only ones with a financial incentive to kill otters and the only ones likely to get frustrated enough with the popular animals to overreact and shoot some of the offending otters. But no one in any official capacity is willing to publicly accuse anyone in the fishing community of the crimes without solid evidence. In fact, when I asked Curland to speculate, he was very diplomatic and went out of his way to avoid saying that he thought fishermen were involved.

  “Whenever we’re asked by the media if this is a case of frustrated fishermen, our answer is ‘it could be,’ ” he said. “But we don’t want to make a blanket statement that it has to be a fisherman….We don’t want to taint all fishermen. It could be a fisherman, but it could be some other disturbed individual. Or it could just be vandals. It’s just incomprehensible to be taking potshots at animals for the fun of it.”

  Since sea otters are protected by the US Endangered Species Act and the Marine Mammal Protection Act, anyone (other than Native Alaskans) convicted of killing an otter in the United States faces significant fines and potential jail time. In British Columbia, where sea otters are listed as a species of special concern, perpetrators would face similar consequences. One of the few recent cases of an individual being prosecuted for such crimes occurred in Moss Landing, California, in 2015, when a man was sentenced to 150 hours of community service, a $500 fine, and six months of probation for shooting a baby sea otter with an air rifle. The man’s justification, which I found ridiculous, was that the otter had been crying for weeks—not likely—and he was annoyed listening to it. Although the animal was not killed in the incident, the man was still convicted.

  * * *

  WALTER AND EVERY OTHER sea otter in British Columbia are descended from otters from Alaska that were translocated to the province between 1969 and 1972. Sea otters had been extirpated from the province during the fur trade, with the last one reportedly shot in 1931. Plenty of suitable habitat was available up and down the outer coast of Vancouver Island when the decision was made by Fisheries and Oceans Canada and the British Columbia Fish and Wildlife Branch to reestablish a sea otter population in the province. In July of 1969, biologists from British Columbia and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game transported thirty otters captured at Amchitka Island to Checleset Bay, on the northwest coast of Vancouver Island, for release. The trip was a stressful one, with multiple stops and transfers to other planes, and one otter died in transit. Few of the others lived long after being released, probably due to the trying circumstances of their journey.

  So in 1970 the government biologists tried again. This time they brought forty-five otters from Prince William Sound, Alaska, to Checleset Bay via ship, a six-day, storm-tossed trip during which many of the otters died from the stress. Just fourteen of the forty-five animals were alive to be released, and little is known about their fate. Officials tried one last time to reintroduce sea otters to British Columbia in 1972, when forty-seven animals were flown from Prince William Sound to Vancouver Island. Upon arrival at Checleset Bay, they were placed in floating holding pens and fed for several days to acclimate them to their new surroundings. Just one of the animals, a female pup, died in the process, and the rest were released in what was believed to be healthy
condition.

  Although a total of eighty-nine sea otters were released in the bay during the three reintroduction efforts, by 1973 the population contained as few as twenty-eight animals, probably because most of them dispersed elsewhere or died. But those that survived were officially protected by a regulation in Canada’s Federal Fisheries Act in 1970 and by the British Columbia Wildlife Act in 1996. In 1981, an ecological reserve was created to encompass thirty-three square miles of Checleset Bay to further protect the sea otter colony. Those efforts, and the natural dispersal of the sea otters, succeeded in quickly growing the otter population. By 1977, sea otters had colonized the west side of Nootka Island, forty-five miles to the south of Checleset Bay, but none were found in between. During the next eighteen years, the British Columbia sea otter population grew at 19 percent per year and then at 8.4 percent per year for the thirteen years after that, spreading throughout much of the west side of Vancouver Island, from Clayoquot Sound in the south up around the north end of the island to Queen Charlotte Strait. A raft of otters was even discovered in 1989 at Goose Island, on the central coast of the province, seventy-five miles north of the rest of the population, and that group had expanded another fifty-five miles north to Aristazabal Island by 2013. Today, more than 5,600 sea otters live in the waters around Vancouver Island, and another 1,000 reside on the central British Columbia coast.

  To find out more about this population of sea otters, I flew by floatplane from Gold River Inlet on an uneventful fifteen-minute flight to Friendly Cove at the tiny historic village of Yuquot, the southwesternmost point of Nootka Island, a 206-square-mile landmass centrally located along the west coast of Vancouver Island. I went there to meet Roger Dunlop, a biologist for the Uu-a-thluk/Nuu-chah-nulth Tribal Council, to conduct a sea otter survey of Nootka Island aboard his thirty-two-foot sailboat Merango, but he hadn’t arrived yet. I knew the unpredictable winds made it difficult to keep a sailboat on any sort of schedule, so I wasn’t surprised. When the boat moored in the cove two hours later, Dunlop said he had been fighting a headwind for most of the way.

  Born in London and raised mostly in Canada, Dunlop worked in the oil industry before pursuing a career in marine biology and wildlife management. For nearly twenty-five years he has worked for the tribal council, which governs about 9,500 First Nations people from fourteen tribes along a two-hundred-mile stretch of Vancouver Island coastline from the Brooks Peninsula south to Port Renfrew. While he focuses most of his attention on studying and managing the region’s salmon fishery, Dunlop also pays close attention to the sea otter population, which some tribal members complain is in direct competition with the tribes for food. He participates in Canada’s sea otter recovery process and conducts regular otter surveys, but he is in the sometimes-uncomfortable position of advocating for the needs of the tribal council while also ensuring that the otter population remains healthy. Despite having no blood relation to the First Nations people, the fair-skinned Dunlop was dubbed “Uupiihaa” by the tribal council, a name he says means “person who helps a lot.”

  We remained anchored in Friendly Cove for the night to await an expected change in the wind that would determine what direction we would take around Nootka Island the following day. So Dunlop took me on a brief walking tour of the village to meet some of the tribal members who were beginning their annual campout on the island.

  It was apropos that we met at Friendly Cove because that’s where Europeans made first contact with the First Nations on the Pacific coast of British Columbia and triggered the trade in sea otter furs. Captain Cook landed in the tiny cove in 1778 and traded with the powerful Chief Maquinna for sea otter pelts that were later sold in China for an exorbitant price. The village soon became a battleground between the Spanish and English, who both sought to control the territory and the fur trade along with it. A Spanish settlement and fort were eventually erected there in the 1780s and later abandoned, rebuilt, and abandoned again after the three Nootka Sound Conventions helped avert war between Spain and England. Maquinna and his people later reoccupied the village, which continued to be important to the fur trade. Even after the sea otter population was wiped out in nearby waters, pelts from great distances away were still brought to Friendly Cove to be traded by Maquinna to the merchants, who the First Nations called the Bostonauts. In 1802, Maquinna and his villagers massacred the crew of the ship Boston, keeping the only two survivors as slaves for three years. But as sea otters became more and more difficult to find in the area, Yuquot and Friendly Cove no longer played a central role in the fur trade.

  * * *

  THE NEXT MORNING we began our circumnavigation of Nootka Island, whose name means “go around, go around” in the Nuu-chah-nulth language. We began by following the outer coast north toward the First Nations village of Nuchatlitz, an area where sea otters are known to be abundant, but we observed few otters along the way. Initially, we made little progress in calm winds and saw just two otters in the distance in our first two hours. But as we approached Bajo Point, where a rocky reef lies just offshore, the wind picked up rapidly and we sped past the reef. We were going so fast that we barely got a glimpse of the sea otters that were foraging in the area. Large waves crashed over the reef, and I was bouncing around in the boat with little ability to scan the water with my binoculars. I believe I saw six animals scattered in pairs amid the kelp on either side of the reef, but I couldn’t be sure. It was my first indication that conducting a sea otter survey from a sailboat was not likely going to generate results that could be relied upon by the scientific community.

  When we finally reached Ferrer Point, the entrance to the southern tip of Nuchatlitz Inlet, Dunlop announced that we were “coming into mom-and-pup central,” where he has annually counted hundreds of sea otter mothers and their young. Located at the northwest corner of Nootka Island, the entire area is part of Nuchatlitz Provincial Park, home to the Nuchatlaht people, and consists of an archipelago of about one hundred islands (and even more at low tide). The entrance to the wide inlet was clogged with guided recreational boats fishing for the large and abundant salmon that traverse the region.

  We lowered the sail and motored to a protected cove, where we moored and took a tiny rubber dinghy to Nuchatlitz Island, to walk the shore at low tide and search for signs of sea otters. What we found was a wide sand flat covered with mussel, butter clam, and cockle shells—almost all empty—along with a number of fist-size horse clam shells with distinctive holes in the middle that were probably made by a sea otter cracking them open with a rock.

  At dawn the next morning, Dunlop and I loaded life preservers, cameras, binoculars, and waterproof data sheets into the dinghy and began a sea otter survey of Nuchatlitz Inlet and the bulk of the archipelago. We headed first for a rocky island about one hundred feet in circumference, near where Dunlop said a raft of mothers and pups are often observed, that would give us a proper vantage point for scanning the region for otters. We tossed a grappling hook to the mussel-covered rocks to secure the boat, then stumbled out and climbed hand over hand to the pinnacle. Although we were just thirty feet above the water’s surface, the view of the dozen nearby islets was impressive. The large raft of female otters and their pups that Dunlop was expecting to see on the other side of the island was nowhere in sight. Instead, a smaller raft of thirty-nine males kept an eye on us as we counted an additional nineteen otters scattered widely over the area. We saw at least three more rafts of otters in the distance, but we waited to get closer before attempting to count them.

  For the next three hours we toured the archipelago as the weather deteriorated and the wind picked up. Dunlop thought nothing of blasting through the waves, but I found it difficult to watch for otters without risking getting thrown into the soup. Yet sea otters were everywhere. We saw three rafts of mother-pup pairs totaling eighty-four animals near Ensenada Island, a similar raft of sixty-seven mother-pup pairs at Justice Island, and smaller numbers at Port Langford, Ferrer Point, and numerous unnamed
sites. We found otters scattered widely throughout the inlet and archipelago, even in areas where Dunlop seldom sees them. Small rafts of males turned up in several unexpected places, like near the outermost islands and Nuchatlitz Reef, where the wind and water conditions were so rough I could do nothing but hold on. Dunlop, though, was skilled at maintaining lists of numbers in his head as we traveled, stopping only occasionally to write them down before moving on to the next area.

  While most of the otter groups we observed appeared to be mother-and-pup pairs, it was sometimes difficult to draw that conclusion because many of the pups were nearly as large as their mothers and were no longer resting on their moms’ bellies. Yet when we approached them, the otter pairs often reunited to gawk at us.

  One pair was particularly bold—or maybe just oblivious to us. Mom wasn’t especially attentive to her pup, and her youngster behaved as if it was nearly ready to be on its own. Still exhibiting some fluffier fur from its natal pelage, the pup strayed a few yards from its mother, seemingly testing out its swimming and diving abilities, but quickly popped back to the surface and immediately glanced around to be sure mom wasn’t too far away. After briefly making eye contact with her, the pup strayed a little farther, until its mother appeared to decide that it had wandered far enough and slowly backstroked to retrieve it. After a quick bout of grooming, the pup began the process again. It clearly thought it was ready for its independence.

  An accidental revving of our outboard motor briefly alarmed the animals, however, and most of the oversize pups returned to their mothers’ sides, including the one we had been watching. Maybe it wasn’t ready for independence after all. It tried to climb aboard its mother’s belly for some added security, but it was too big and slipped off the other side, making me laugh out loud and alarm the animals further. With a little yank from mom, the pup finally balanced on its mother’s belly as she paddled them away to a safer distance. Mom then attempted to groom her not-so-little one, scratching its chest and neck with her paws, but they couldn’t maintain their balance long and eventually gave up the effort. After staring at Dunlop and me for a few moments, they decided it was safe to go about their activities, so the pup began another round of exercising its independence. That was our signal to move on.