they probably aren't great at catching fish in open water, but they sure do scare the fish... And they smell bad. I think they do pretty well in fresh water though.

 

I'm not positive about this but I think "river otters" stick to the fresh water rivers and sea lions and seals you will find all over the Sound...especially when the salmon or steelhead are running. Sea Lions are the most voracious killer/eaters of Salmon & Steelhead.....bawling:

It's easy to get them all confused - they look very similar with just their heads poking out of the water.:hmmm:

Jc

 

Thanks Jc, but these are definitely river otters in the Sound. They pop up onto rocks right next to me and feed. I'm just not aware of their fish catching skills beyond the sculpin I see them eating.

 

i agree there are river otters in so sound
there is a family that live in a culvert by glen cove
scale of the head is what i attempt to id with
maybe there is a better name for them
how bout sea weasel


some coho still popping down here

 

River otters in the sound? yes. Threat to salmon? no.

 

River otters are all over the sound and they are pretty good fishermen. Up in the B-ham area I quite often see mother otters (fisherwoman) catching flounder and bringing them back to their young on the shore. I would guess that they take some seeruns but that is their place in the system.

Russell

 

I see them pretty often in the summer and fall when fishing the tidal flux in some of the creeks/rivers entering Grays Harbor and Willapa Bay. I think they eat a lot of crawdads just above the head of tidewater.
Its kind of a drag when one of those little rascals gets territorial and huffy at you, won't leave the pool, but keeps swimming around scaring the cutthroat and wheezing at you. Re_e_e_e_al cute!

I usually see families with a mom and 4 or 5 pups early on, in June and July. This year there was one in the estuary just above the Elk River bridge.

Fresh/Salt? River Otter vs Sea Otter? There is no hard and fast boundary for these local river otters, as far as i can tell. They don't mind the salt, and are in the estuaries. Lakes, too.
I thought I saw some Sea Otters on a Cape Flattery beach several years ago. They looked bigger, though.

I see Mink in the Willapa River in the tide-affected water upstream of the Hwy 101 bridge all the time. Along the bank, on top of pilings, swimming across. Saw one come out of the water with a Peamouth Chub in its mouth on lower Smith Creek a few years ago, and run up a small downed tree trunk only about 30 feet away.

We have regular ol' weasels here at the beach in Westport. I used to see them at Westhaven State Park. I'll bet they ate a lot of pheasants. Maybe not. Maybe the pheasants ate the weasels. I always saw more pheasants there then weasels.:beer2:
One mama weasel tried to raise a family under the water heater between the men's and women's restrooms in the OLD Westhaven St Park bathhouse back in the early 80's, but thats ancient history. The shoreline has long since eroded eastward of the old bathhouse, the area filled in, and a new bathhouse built. However, I saved a corner chunk of the old bathhouse to use as a doorstop.
Well, they ripped up the area to build a golf course, and then the developer ran out of money. I hope the original weasels do better.
Don't worry about those river otters eating too many cutthroat, though. They were here eating them long before WE took the fish populations down.

 

Anyone who doesn't think there are river otters all over the sound can come and scape the otter crap off my dock every morning. And if you look at that stuff, you will see a variety of bone matter running from shellfish to fin fish. There are river otters in every estuary and in most open water areas as well. A threat to SRC? - Not compared to the other factors. Natural predators are an integral part of the system. Leave them alone.

 

River otters will often swim up small creeks into local/private ponds. A friend of mine had a pond filled with 3-5lb rainbow trout which was a mile from the salt and the river otters demolished his fish.
Their skat has bones in it, but I have never been able to identify what type of fish the bones came from.

 

I lived in the San Juans for a number of years. No streams to speak of on Shaw Island, but many otters. One evening I watched an otter swim to the beach, from about 300 yards out, carrying a large rock fish in its mouth. What I noticed first was a slow moving object in the water making a large wake as it moved towards shore. When I could tell that it was an otter, I was amazed at the size of the rock fish, and the determination of the otter. After the otter reached shore, I could hear the otter crunching on its meal for what seemed like hours. Growing up in the south sound, I do not remember seeing otters until maybe the early 1980's. Now, I see them all of the time. One family I will never forget. I was living in a small cabin near the beach on Wollochet Bay, and a mama gave birth to batch of babies under the cabin. OMG. I thought the terrible smell was caused by dead rats. I will never forget the look on the exterminators face when he put his head down below the floorboards and was met with a very unhappy and vicious mother, face to face! I let her be, and it took about a month before she and the little ones moved out.

 

How do you tell the difference bt/wn a river otter and sea otter? There is a group of 4-5 otters that have been my constant companion around one of my local haunts on B.I. I've also seen a couple every now and then in Eagle Harbor as the ferry comes in. Not sure if the effect fishing that much because the fishing was pretty poor this year even when they weren't around.

 

.

 

River otters are more slender and don't hang out floating on their backs. Sea otters are not common in Puget Sound, but river otters are.

In that case these are river otters...sometimes they goof around pretty close to me on shore, but usually they are swimming just outside of casting distance. Definately of the long and lanky variety.

 

A friend of mine who lives on the saltwater at Campbell River, BC has a family of river otters living under his garden shed which is located near the water. He hasn't decided whether to shoo them out or not. They've been there for two years.
Les Johnson

 

Les, after living under the shed for two years they should own that plot of land! Do they trash his garden?

 

We've had them living in our boat house before. They stink, they are messy, and they leave their crap all over the place. They are relatives of skunks and weasels, so they have scent glands and they use them to mark their turf. Best enjoyed at a distance, and as far as getting them to leave a human dwelling all I can only tell you that they are no longer in the boathouse.

 

Have a pond that I transplanted a bunch of crawtads to. Never saw an otter prior to that.
A week later a family of them were there chowing down.
How they figured that out that they were there so fast I'll never know.
Crawdads are gone and so are the otters. (I think)

 

The river otters don't seem to bother my friend's garden. Maybe his dog, Abbey keeps them away from it. They do eat on the beach in front of his and other folk's houses though. As for the smell, I didn't get that close but I don't doubt that they could stink things up.
Les

 

Des Moines Marina used to try to get rid of all the Otters. Trouble was by chasing away the otters they ended up being over run by rats. By letting the two find a natural balance, neither becomes a big problem for the boat owners who pay up to $500 per month to moor their boats in the marina. Take away to many Otters and the rats start to take over eating any thing the can get to including wiring in the boat which can and has caused boat fires. Fire is not a good thing around a bunch of large dollar boats. Get rid of the rats and the Otters end up over running the marina eating all the sea life and any thing else they can in the break water area and making lots of mess every where. By leaving both alone, there are alway some of both but they end up being in balance with every other living thing in the marina and no real harm happens with maybe just a small issue once in a while.
I am not sure why they keep each other in check. Not sure if the marina knows why themselves
Course the darn birds down there can sure make their own type of messes on the boats. Funny thing is with all the high dollar fixes including fake owls {worthless}, Wirly gigs works some what but little better then an old fishing flasher set to swing in the wind etc a simple fishing line stung up between bridge and bow seems to do more good then anything. They think the birds sense it but do not really see it which scares them just enough to go else where. I had my own bird problem a while back with a wood pecker using my house to attract a mate every morning. Simple fix for this was some dollar store xmas tinsel stapled around the area he was using. The flash from the tinsel did the trick and now he stays away.
This reminds me I need to remember to string some fishing line on my boat this winter to keep the boat cover cleaner this year. Forgot to last winter.

 

I was up to my waist casting well into the darkness in late September off Victoria one year, hoping to hook a coho out of the couple I had seen jumping. I had seen an otter running along the sea wall earlier in the evening so thankfully I was only freaked out for about 2 seconds when the otter, too busy searching for rock crabs in the cobble stones to notice my boot was not a rock, picked up my boot to look for a crab. I said "What the #$@!" and the otter surfaced with a dismissive snort 6 feet in front of me before he swam down the beach. I called it a night after that.

 

Yes they are river otter. I see quite a few of them in Hoods Canal. I never see them eat anything large though, usually 10-12" fish is about as big as you see them catch. They seem to adapt very well to salt water and there is an abundance of food for them.