This was a different experience to seeing otters on an island beach in Scotland; river otters are supremely secretive, and their territories cover a huge range. The habitat here was certainly right for them, and the population of my river was probably as good as anywhere. If there was a protracted dry spell in the summer I would always head down to my nearest stretch of the river. This was a perfect territory for otters, very secluded and heavily wooded on both banks. On my side of the river the bank was vertical for the first eight or ten feet, and it was only when the water levels were at their very lowest that I could get below this. The shrunken river at this time would expose little coves of grey sand, a highway for anything making its way along the riverside. Without fail I would find otter prints in every stretch of sand, rounded pads compared to the more spidery trail of the mink. In fact, there would always be the trail of more than one otter: a bitch and her accompanying young. Like the snow in winter, the drought gave me a momentary glimpse into a hidden world. There was a conservation officer for otters responsible for the river here; he tried to monitor numbers by recording signs such as spraints, droppings left on prominent boulders as territorial markers, and advising landowners on how to make an otter-friendly habitat on the bankside. After three years in post he had decided to take a busman’s holiday to Scotland, for he had yet to see an otter in the wild. I mentioned my sighting of the dog otter to the doctor at the field centre the next time I saw him, and he told me that seeing otters on the river here was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. I asked him how many times he had seen one here. Twice, he said.
My landlord told me an extraordinary story about otters living on this river, dating back around a hundred years. One of the tenant farmers had apparently turned up at the door of the big house in a state of some agitation. Come quick, m’lud, he had said when he had caught his breath, and you’d better bring your gun. The otters are killing my sheep. And it was true: the otters were indeed killing his sheep, in a fashion. A pair of cubs had constructed themselves a mudslide on the riverbank, and they were evidently having such fun chasing each other down the slide and splashing into the water that they decided to spread the joy. They began to bound around the riverside field and round up the sheep as though they were sheepdog puppies, and drive them one by one on to the slide and into the river. It is hard not to laugh at the thought of a long line of sodden, bleating sheep, bobbing downriver towards the sea, but I can understand that the farmer might not have found it quite so entertaining. History does not relate whether the landowner did in fact bring his gun, or use it, but something tells me this was not a scenario that led to a happy ending for the otter cubs.
In the same way that I surveyed nesting birds in the woods each spring, I conducted an annual survey of the river birds too. This was no gentle stroll along a riverside path — as there was no path. It entailed scrambling along vertiginous banks, clambering over fallen tree trunks, leaping over gullies or sometimes from boulder to boulder at the water’s edge, climbing barbed-wire fences and picking a way through banks of nettles. The section of river I covered was only four miles or so long but it took me all day to traverse. The first mile was the heaviest going of all, the banks an overgrown jumble of boulders, the river rocky and racing. Then the river twisted and turned for a mile or two, all shifting shoals and islands in pale grey. After that it became heavily wooded to both sides; this was the part of the river closest to my cottage, which I might visit briefly on an idle day, and was one of its most secluded parts, an area never troubled by grazing sheep or cattle. The final stretch was more open and easy to negotiate; this was familiar ground, a part of the route I would always take when walking to the village, and I would finish the survey at the same spot where I always paused when on a shopping trip: a big shingly island, wide and sunny and the perfect place to end the day with a swim if the weather allowed.
Of all the birds on the river, the most visible was the goosander. It is hard to imagine now that these were relatively recent arrivals; they took over the rivers of Wales only in the 1970s, their range spreading rapidly from the north. These are sawbill ducks; their long red bills are serrated for catching hold of slippery fish and look as if they are toothed, and with their long flexible necks they have an almost reptilian appearance. In theory they would come to the river to breed, and in the winter head to the lakes and estuaries of the lowlands, but in my experience a few would stay on until October or even November, and the first arrivals for the new season would turn up as early as December, so they were never really absent. There were far fewer in the late autumn and early winter, though, their place as the main threat to the fish supply being taken by the most prominent winter visitor, the cormorant. Here were birds that looked even more like reptiles than the goosanders, especially when actively fishing with their whole bodies submerged and just their black necks and yellow bills protruding from the flood water. It was strange to see birds that I had always thought of as seabirds so far inland, but of course to them, seawater or freshwater, a fish is a fish. Herons lurked on the banks too, patiently awaiting the unwary. A walk to the river at any time of year would always turn up at least a couple of herons. They would yelp and flush awkwardly when surprised, apparently struggling to get aloft on their huge wings. They looked too heavy to fly with ease, but it was an illusion; they were always there fishing in summer, even though the nearest heronry that I knew of was at least fifteen miles away. Sawbills, cormorants and herons: the most antediluvian of birds. Seeing them all together through the mists that clung to the river in winter felt like stepping back in time, like watching dinosaurs.
The male and female goosanders could be different species; they look totally dissimilar, and have quite different life cycles. The males were brief visitors to the river; they would arrive in the winter or early spring, remaining only for the period of courtship and mating, and then they would be gone again, leaving the females to do all the work alone. The males seemed to just vanish from the river, and indeed from the whole country. For a long time it remained a mystery where they hid themselves all summer long, until they were finally discovered far, far away on the northern coasts of Norway, hiding out the moult in the deep fjords. They were much larger than the females, with big metallic-green heads and their bodies a white so pristine it was almost startling, like a shelduck out on an estuary amid the hordes of dun-coloured winter waders.
The little redheads, as the females are known, are much more finely built, their heads rufous and shaggy-crested, their bodies a delicate grey rather than white. They are shy birds, and would hear me coming along the riverbank and flush long before the mallards, flying fast on whistling wings. But once their eggs had hatched in their hidden tree-hole nests, the young would leave almost at once and follow their mother to the river, and then of course they couldn’t flush without abandoning their young. The mother bird would be perpetually alert; as soon as she saw or heard me coming down the riverbank she would start swimming downstream repeatedly glancing back over her shoulder. The chicks would jump on to her back to hitch a free ride, or at least as many of them as could fit, for she would often have over ten chicks in tow. If she was not managing to increase the distance between me and her young she would suddenly switch to a new gear, flapping her wings and running through the water, churning up the river behind her like she had an outboard motor. And her brood of ducklings would race along behind her, trying to keep up, all leaving their own miniature wake in their trail, all vying to get a chance to hop up on to the safety of her back. Their tiny bodies would rise from the water as they ran, like miniature hovercraft.