Otter Report

[troutfitter77]

Quite the stir I have created with my initial comments. I can certainly see points on both sides of the table and I don't take any of it as complaining or over the top. I am excited to see that we have so many passionate outdoors men and women out there that care about the woods and waters we enjoy...no matter what side of an issue they fall on. This board is a pretty good litmus test for that! Its not about who's wrong and who's right, its mostly opinion on matters like this. We take a great deal of our personal experiences into account when espousing our opinions on any matter so facts are relevant but not necessary for a strong opinion.

[Al Agnew]

The problem, whenever there is one, goes deeper than just the predator. Given good habitat and food supply, the prey species can "keep ahead" of the predators. Got a problem with red-tailed hawks eating your rabbits and quail? It would probably be less of a problem if your habitat was better. Otters cleaning out the local creek? They'd have a harder time of it if the creek wasn't filled in with gravel and bulldozed out to straighten the channel in places.

My brother-in-law lives on a nice hill-country farm, which he acquired 25 years or so ago. When he got it, it was cowed off to nothing but cedar trees, multiflora rose, and close-cropped fescue. Rabbits and quail were practically non-existent. He plowed the fescue under, planted warm season grasses, let the brush grow, and hinged the cedars (cut them most of the way through and let them lay). In 3 or 4 years he had so many rabbits it wasn't fun to hunt them with a shotgun, we were shooting them on the run with .22 automatics....But, after a few years the hinged cedars died and rotted away. The brush got big enough to shade the ground. There were coyotes and bobcats everywhere, eating all the rabbits and quail, but they were eating them because the rabbits and quail had less cover once those cedars died off and the brush got too big. The rabbits that survived did so because they hung out around the relatively few pieces of "hard" cover, like old piles of logs or fallen down sheds, or huge brushpiles BIL had piled up while clearing out little food plots. Large expanses of the farm had gone back to having too little food or cover.

It's amazing how little cover and deep water a smallmouth needs to thrive during the summer when the minnows and crayfish are everywhere and the fish is fast and active. But it's a different story in the winter, when they are slower and need good cover and larger expanses of deep water in which to hide and evade critters like otters.

[ness]

Good perspective Al.

It's always easiest to pick a bad guy and blame the whole thing on him.

I suppose a guy with a pond ravaged by otters has options besides killing all the otters and stocking more fish. Which, by the way, sounds like a way to go both crazy and broke.