The Last Wild Places of Kansas by George Frazier

Author:George Frazier [George Frazier]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780700622207
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2016-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Otter tracks along Mink Creek in the Baker Wetlands, Douglas County, Kansas.

Fresh scat covered the ground and new slides at multiple locations led from the trail down onto the ice. At the base of one of the slides that ended in a cattail pond, I placed Chloe’s ruler up against a five-toed track in the snow: it measured three inches long, more than two inches larger than a mink print. The tail print was clearly visible in the slide. I took pictures of more tracks as we followed the fresh Morse code trail all the way to the Wakarusa. Back home I was able to crank down the contrast on the photos and build an outline of the imprints. Not only were these tracks much larger than a mink’s, but the toes also had the candle flame shape. Chloe and I were past the point of no return now. We had to either see this river otter or capture a photograph.

That night I ordered a field camera on eBay and emailed the latest evidence to Marcus and Dr. Boyd, who replied, “There is little question in my mind that this is an otter, especially from the size of the tracks.” He also gave me permission to put up the camera. Marcus told me the slides were “100% otter, in Canada they use helicopters to look for this kind of pattern when doing population surveys.”

Now all we had to do was get the money shot. I wasn’t at all confident we would be successful. The camera wouldn’t arrive for a week. Meanwhile, a warm front was heading our way. Spring can land overnight in Kansas, and the first day of March was almost upon us. What if otters only ventured into the wetlands on carpets of ice?

The next week, at a Jayhawk Audubon Society presentation on the status of the ivory-billed woodpecker in northeastern Arkansas, I looked around at the birders in the auditorium and realized nobody “mammal-watched,” at least not in the same way people bird-watched. I told Jay I’d spent the last week birding for otters and that Christina was confiding to friends that all I wanted to talk about was scat. He said, “Pretty soon people will just call it ottering.”

While I waited for the field camera to arrive, I kept making trips to the wetlands. Every day it got warmer and I didn’t see any new sign of scat or tracks. Finally, on a balmy afternoon, the UPS guy brought my camera. The only ice that remained was in the deep shade of the northern part of the wetlands. At sundown, Chloe and I strapped the camera to a black walnut tree near Mink Creek and aimed the laser pointer at the otter slide where I had taken the best pictures of tracks. Chloe crawled across the trail like an otter so I could train the infrared temperature sensor. When she crossed its field of view, the camera took three shots spaced one second apart.

That night I could hardly sleep.

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