Nature Notes: Returning the Otter

Out of the mouth of babes come gems . . . to paraphrase a well-based adage about the wisdom of children. Such was the case when Judy Shepard was driving her 4-year-old granddaughter home from preschool in Sag Harbor last fall.

As they passed Otter Pond on their way to Noyac, little Irina asked the name of the pond. When Judy responded, Irina asked, “Are there otters in it?”

“No” came the reply.

“Why do they call it Otter Pond if there are no otters there?” was the third question. Judy explained that there must have been otters living there at one time. Irina thought for a while and then mused “Why don’t they put some otters back in it?”

When Irina’s father, Caleb, heard about the conversation he began thinking about otters returning to otter pond. He’s been working on the proposition ever since.

There used to be otters in Otter Pond, but not since the 19th century, except for an occasional visit by one. For 200 years after the beaver disappeared in early settlement times, otters persisted. The late Roy Latham, a potato farmer from Orient and perhaps Long Island’s greatest naturalist, regularly observed otters on Long Island into the 1930s.

According to Paul Conner, who conducted the last exhaustive search for mammals here in the 1960s and wrote about it in his “Mammals of Long Island” guide published in 1971, Latham first saw them in Great Pond (or Lake Montauk) in 1925 before it was opened to the sea, but he also found them in Montauk’s Big Reed Pond and Oyster Pond. In 1928 he observed two using a slide in Lake Montauk, which had by then been permanently opened to Block Island Sound.

It is not surprising to have had them here, and to the west in Nassau County and Queens for so long a time. After all, the river otter, lontra canadensis, pretty much populated most of North America up until the Dust Bowl era of the 1930s. Three sibling species still occupy much of Eurasia. Apparently beavers were more easily trapped than otters and their pelts were much in demand by colonists and Europeans. Today beavers are even more widespread throughout North American than the otter.

A Dutch writer and lawyer, Adriaen van der Donck, wrote in 1656 that beavers were plentiful along with wolves and bobcats and some bears in the “New Netherlands” colony. Evidence of their former presence lives on in several road names starting with “beaver” in Suffolk County. Six of Suffolk’s 10 townships have roads with beaver in their name: Brookhaven, by far Long Island’s largest town, has nine. Southampton has two. Babylon, Smithtown, and Islip have one each. The 1998 edition of Hagstrom’s Suffolk County Atlas lists not a single road with the name “otter” in it.

While I was working with a team of scientists and naturalists on the Mashomack Preserve master plan for the Nature Conservancy in 1981 and ’82, we observed tracks of an otter or two on the Shelter Island site. Shortly after that, actual otter observations there became an annual event. Even today otters or their leavings — slides, fecal matter, tracks — turn up here and there across Long Island. Mike Bottini has been active documenting otter signs and has found at least 39 different locations with signs of otter habitation or visitation. He goes so far as to examine scat, by observing and smelling it, to document his observations. He is a founder of the Long Island River Otter Project, which it is hoped will culminate in the re-establishment of the otter as a familiar mammal here, a feat that has already been carried out successfully in many areas of the Midwest and elsewhere in the United States after the otter’s disappearance.

So it shouldn’t be that hard to re-establish the otter on Long Island, and in particular in Sag Harbor’s Otter Pond. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation reintroduced wild turkeys from upstate New York beginning in January of 1991, and that restocking of a bird long gone from here has been a great success. If little Irina and her father have their way, in the not too distant future we’ll be driving along Jermain Avenue in Sag Harbor, looking at the ducks and geese as we pass by Otter Pond and all of a sudden we’ll see a splash and a furry animal with a fish in its mouth purposing along toward shore. You can bet it will be an otter.

Larry Penny can be reached via email at [email protected].