It’s been a busy few weeks around here. We’ve been shooting the various high school sports championships, so time is at a premium. But I still have been able to sneak out to my favorite spots and check on my wild friends. And while I was out on one of those trips, I saw something that I have never seen before and still can’t explain. Hopefully one of my readers has seen this behavior before and can explain it to me! Click images to enlarge
breakfast……
The Otter shown above was just hanging out, quietly enjoying a breakfast snack of fresh Bullhead when a large Beaver swam up to him and began acting in an aggressive manner which seemed to startle the Otter.
The Otter is sitting on a half-submerged log about 30 feet long, with a large root ball at the left end of the log.
The Otter was clearly disturbed by the Beaver’s behavior and began backing up on the log, all the way to the end of the log. The Otter actually walked up backwards onto the end of the log, never taking his eyes off of the Beaver. And the Beaver kept advancing towards the Otter. This was really making the Otter nervous. And I had never seen any kind of interaction between the two before, so I had no idea what was going on!
What the heck is his problem?
Otters will occasionally share a beaver lodge in the winter time and I thought that maybe the Otter hadn’t paid his rent yet. Or maybe he got caught canoodling with missus beaver?
Eventually the beaver got so close that the otter started hissing at the beaver to let him know that the beaver wasn’t welcome.
Back Off!!!
The Otter eventually ended up on the very top of the root ball of the dead log and the two had a staring match for several minutes. With a quick splash, the beaver was gone, but it took several minutes for the Otter to work up the courage to leave the relative safety of the log.
Like I have said many, many time before, “you can’t make this stuff up!!!”