Environment and nature

The Return of the Otter

Half a century ago, anyone proposing to look for otters along the Fenwater would have been thought eccentric. Decades of industrial run-off and agricultural chemicals had left the river so poisoned that few ecologists expected the animal ever to live there again, let [1] raise young. The fish on which otters depend had largely vanished, and the reed-fringed banks where they once made their holts had been straightened into concrete channels.

The recovery, when it came, owed less to any single intervention than to a slow accumulation of small ones. Factories upstream were obliged to treat their waste; farmers were paid to leave strips of uncultivated land between their fields and the water; volunteers spent weekends hauling shopping trolleys out of the shallows. None of these measures was aimed at otters in particular. It was only when a fisherman photographed a set of unmistakable five-toed prints in the mud below the old mill that anyone realised how far the river had come.

Today the Fenwater supports at least three breeding females, a figure that would have seemed fanciful to the men and women who began the clean-up.