Some of my best otter watching occurred in the fall of 1997 after I had just bought my first camcorder and when I was still a bit overwhelmed and under informed. I consistently saw four otters and then with the first snow in November they broke up into two groups of two otters. I thought I was seeing romance, when in reality I was seeing two families break up. So on this December morning after our first big snow that year, my family met an otter family. The voices you briefly hear in the beginning are my wife's, my ten year old son's and mine as we discussed the very fresh otter prints in the snow. Fortunately we were all quiet going up the small hill and we saw the two otters.

I think what we see in the video clip is the mother teaching the pup how to slide in the snow, probably not a difficult lesson because the otter body is shaped perfectly for it. Sliding in the snow is an important skill for otters to learn. Otters can slide for considerable distances on the snow, especially going down hill. We automatically think such otters are playing, and the otters in this clip certainly do look like they're having some fun, but I must confess that I've never seen a group of slides that were obviously left by otters having fun like kids sledding down a hill. As you'll soon see, otters like to claim the high ground when they travel. I assume they do that to get an advantage over possible pursuers especially coyotes. So perfecting a good slide, as these otters might have been doing early in the winter, is as much about survival as it is about playing.

You might think that as the winter deepens and gets even colder with ice on the ponds getting a foot thick, that otters might be jeopardy. Well, tell me if this otter that I saw in January looks troubled: page37