« African Field Notes Updated - Info! Video! Pix! | Main | Animal Aging »

April 11, 2007

California Sea Otters: Haul Out On Land

The best, not to mention the most dangerous, aspect of nature photography, is that wildlife will always surprise you.

I've found that animals in the wild rarely display your "typical" behavior. National Geographic knows this very well, just look at the recent April 2007 article called Lessons Of The Hunt, where a young leopard kills her first baboon only to adopt its infant temporarily. Certainly not what you'd expect would happen, especially to a young leopard afraid of baboons.

My current special project, the California Sea Otters, is an excellent example of how wildlife doesn't always act as you'd expect. Everytime I go down to visit the otters, I see something I'd never read about before.

Bigger Rafts

The first time I visited Moss Landing, there was a raft of about 50-60 otters hanging out together. I had read that you might see packs of up to 10 together and that they segregated themselves by gender. I will occassionally see a small group of otters, often the younger ones, break off from the main group and play in another part of the slough, but for the most part, the main group stays together.

Shy or Not?

Most of the otters are pretty skittish, unless they're busy eating. When boats approach too close, they all dive and move to another part of the slough. Still, some otters are less shy than others.

Take this past Monday, for example. I had staked out this great spot to photograph the Moss Landing wildlife. It was low tide and I positioned myself at the end of the jetty, down at the waterline. Here, the seals, otters and shorebirds cruised in from the ocean and were almost on top of me before they noticed me. This made for some great seal and bird shots and the main group of otters drifted closer and closer. I was watching a Western Grebe, with its beady red eyes, fish under the water at my feet and so I didn't notice the little otter come zooming around the jetty within 10 feet of me. This otter, whom I've dubbed Baby because it had one pink and one blue tag on its flippers, swam right up to me and made to jump up on the rock next to me. I was so surprised, I took a quick step backward, away from the otter, and so Baby decided to stay in the water and look at me instead. Movement or talking on my part did not phase Baby, who floated so close the long lens of my camera could barely focus. After about 10 minutes, the otter rejoined the main group about 20 meters away.

How Close Is Too Close?

Getting close to wildlife is always a bit art and a bit luck. Stealth helps, too. You're stalking these wild creatures, and putting yourself in amongst them, hopefully without upseting them or causing yourself harm. I generally use the following rules: start with the Marine Mammal Protection Act and stay back 25-30 feet, but stay back even further if the animal seems wary or bothered by your presence.

Sometimes, you have to use a bit of stealth and underhandedness. I was able to sneak up amongst a large group of notoriously shy harbor seals the other day by using the fact that some idiots were scaring them from another direction and they weren't watching me. I couldn't stop the guys from bothering the seals, so I used the distraction to my advantage, placing myself between two groups. I also have found that as long as you do not directly approach a seal, but instead zigzag back and forth closer, they do not panic and enter the water. Once in position, I get down close to the ground and look small and non-threatening. This way, the seals can relax and I can relax and take their pictures.

I know I'm doing it right when the seals resume their original activities and the shorebirds start approaching and fishing within a few feet of me. When its time to go, I slowly rise and back away, never approaching any of the animals. I walk backwards to keep an eye on the animals, and pause if they seem troubled.

When Too Close Happens

This brings me to what happened two days ago. I'm still riding on a high of my immense good luck at the experience, but at first it was a bit unsettling because I got trapped using my own rules, which leads me to another good piece of advice: Always have a secondary escape route.

I had positioned myself at the base of a seacliff, in the afternoon shade with the sun setting behind me. The otters were right in front of me, frollicking in the sun. They were well lit, but I wasn't, and there was a pretty strong wind. In retrospect, my position hunkered down on the beach was really too good - they couldn't smell me and the sun blinded them from seeing me well. Some of them did know I was there, they would come up to within about 10 feet of shore, look at me, and swim away.

A couple of otters had been teasing me like this for about two hours, and I was getting some great shots, intently focused on the otters right in front of me. I do try to be aware of my surroundings, but the beach was only 20 feet wide and my back was to the cliff, so I didn't check my left, right or behind very often. So because of this, I had missed a rather large otter standing in about an inch of water up the beach from me, and in the other direction, another one was looking like it was doing the same.

Now comes the weird part. First one otter, then another, and another, come crawling out of the water around me. They blocked off my way off the beach without walking by them. The first large otter hauled out and curled up smack in the middle of the 20 foot beach, forcing me to skirt around it with very little room to spare. This otter, Sleepy (my husband named her), went straight to sleep on the beach, and wasn't the slightest bit upset by my setting up the camera about 30 feet away from her.

As I sat there watching her, another otter hauled out, came up to her and poked her with its nose. She opened her eyes, rolled over, and went back to sleep. The other otter went back into the water to play. Some young boys came along while I went to the car and tried to poke it and pet it and feed it crab legs, but I explained they shouldn't bug it like that (they were tourists and barey spoke English and didn't know it was an otter).

I went back and took more pictures of Sleepy and told my husband to come down to the beach and see this, because we hadn't known that sea otters ever came on land. Its not that they're not capable, but they are really quite graceless on land. They walk along on their front flippers and drag their wet back end out of the surf. When he arrived, it was almost sunset. We watched more and more otters haul out. We counted 12 otters on our short stretch of beach. Seven of which had hauled out together and were running around on the beach, doing that hop-like ferret walk. At least thirty more otters still floated in the shallows nearby. We got some video footage and I'll post it on the podcast feed later this month.

I cannot find much of anything online about sea otters hauling out on land. It's a very rare event, and to see so many is really amazing. I've contacted the Monterey Bay Aquarium to ask about this behavior. I read that mothers often beach their babies while they hunt, but there were no babies here. These were resting otters and some younger ones playing and running around.

I would never have anticipated that the otters would have come up on the beach. If I had, I would have been paying more attention to my flanks while I was shooting. Luckily, Sleepy was just that, and she wasn't bothered when I had to sneak by her, she just kept on snoozing.

Posted by sorsha at April 11, 2007 9:24 AM