Harbouring an Otter

This afternoon while feeding the swans in the Harbour, I saw an Otter fishing along the harbour walls.
Unfortunately I did not have my camera, but  you can check out previous sightings by me by typing in the word Otter in the search box on my blog page. This will give you many pages and pics covering the Otter sightings.

Urban Otter !

Heard today from one of the regular river walkers an interesting story. It appears that his relative coming along the high street in the early hours about 3am, near the top of Gordon street, saw a strange animal, after watching closer he realised it was in fact an Otter ! When he told me this I did not doubt it, the lane beside Constabulary gardens leads down to the river and the factors pool. It's perfectly possible that the otter headed up the lane in the wee small hours. Now we have a town centre Otter ! I have seen Otters on several occasions over the years, but the best sighting was in the harbour some years ago, video can be seen on this link. 

Otter Danger

Penny set the alarm bells going this evening in the Harbour and the Cygnets quickly scrambled to get onto her back.

 An Otter was spotted fishing along the harbour entrance wall, and Penny quickly got the cygnets out of the water and onto the harbour beach.
I suspect this Otter has been resident around the Harbour for some time, and is probably the killer of 2 young ducks in the harbour earlier in the year.

 It is noticeable that few ducks use the harbour these days with an Otter resident !

Harbour Otter

Slight change of topic - tonight down at the harbour whilst checking on the Swans, a duck started making a big fuss alerting the swans that danger was around. Sure enough within a minute or two I spotted an Otter feasting on Salmon Parr, harbour is full of them at the moment. Poor quality pics but short video clips confirm it was an Otter. One more predator for the Swans and ducks to worry about ! If you missed my old post on the Nairn harbour otter, you can see it here with video clips, http://simplysuperbswans.blogspot.co.uk/2010/09/harbour-otter.html

Nairn Harbour Otter

Rare treat for me this morning when I checked on the injured cygnet down in the harbour.

The Swans were very edgy and the injured one gave a call which alerted the others. I looked around but couldn't see anything, until I saw a trail of bubbles along the harbour wall then the cob started hissing and led the others away.
An otter was fishing along the wall and rose occasionally for air, and to crunch the odd flounder ! It seemed completely unconcerned although it was mid day and sun shining, with low tide it was diving and catching lots of flounders in the harbour silt. This is the best view I've ever had of an Otter doing it's own thing. The 3rd pic shows it finishing a flounder ! The short video's are purely because it only surfaced for seconds at a time, It was a treat for me. Yet another tourist attraction !