Pat’s Wildways: An otter in the pond!

Last week’s story detailed the long-needed brush clearing of our edge of the retention pond. I was eager to show our landscaper, Rob, the changes since he had been in our yard mowing grass before this happened. So, when he showed up for his weekly yard service, I walked with him over to the pond to admire the work together. But wait! What is that I see slipping from the woods into the water? OMG, it was an otter!

One reason we bought this home 25 years ago was because of the then-undeveloped area and the retention pond bordering our property. At the time, this pond was frequented by otters as they traveled around Amelia Island in search of food and mates. For the first 10 or so years of our home occupancy, I regularly saw otters stopping into our pond for a snack on their way to elsewhere. The regular otter visitors I named “The Three Stooges” and saw them often enough to take photos.

Well, those times are long gone. Amelia Island has been heavily developed; the once abundant bits of natural cover have been largely replaced with human construction and the once-traveled routes between different watery areas have been opened up, with more traffic on more roads. For a number of years, there were no otters seen in our pond, and those on the Greenway have become rare to nonexistent too. Sadly, the few otters I saw in recent years were road kills. I had all but given up on otters on Amelia Island. But a miracle happened! An otter was seen entering our pond!

Back in the days when we first moved to our new home on the edge of the retention pond I was a firm proponent of the St. Johns River Water Management District’s 2000 publication “Neighborhood Guide to Stormwater Systems.” I distributed copies to all neighbors and I spent countless muddy hours in drainage ditches digging up native aquatic plants like duck potato, native irises and pickerel weed, and replanting them at our pond edge. The addition of native plants was seen to be a formula for a healthy pond and for a while our pond shoreline was resplendent with flowering native plants and dragonflies — signs of a healthy ecosystem. But all this was for naught. When our development was built out and everyone had the required grassy lawns to maintain with broad-leaved dollarweed-killing herbicides flowing into the retention pond, all broad-leaved aquatic plants in the pond died from these chemicals as well. And the addition of vegetation-consuming sterilized Asian grass carp meant to control algae also ate up any plants along the shore that hung within reach. So, no algae in the pond. And few plants of any kind either.

In the ensuing years, I stopped focusing on the pond and wasn’t really all that concerned that I could no longer see it through the encroaching wax myrtle forest. Some things are beyond my control. There is no fighting a system that now sees a “healthy” pond as one devoid of greenery. I looked for nature elsewhere and mostly thought of our backyard retention pond as a contaminated sewer, full of toxic chemicals from the surrounding roads and lawns.

But this gloomy outlook brightened up a bit for me when we could finally see the pond again. When I walked with Rob along the newly cleared shoreline, a frog splashed into the water — yes, some frogs did survive, even though their shoreline vegetation was depleted. Ok, that’s good. I could see a trio of large Asian grass carp moving through the water, but I could also see some smaller fish that an otter could happily consume. And once again I saw the head of a large snapping turtle that has been in the pond since the get-go. And other pond turtles, although fewer than previously, were still there. Admittedly, there is much less biodiversity in the pond, something I am well aware of as a professional international biodiversity specialist who analyzes biodiversity loss in foreign countries. But there are still signs of life.

Lately, people have once again reported seeing an occasional otter on the Greenway and in the pond behind the YMCA. Maybe a new generation of otters is learning to effectively make their way around this urban ecosystem once again. Let’s hope they find one another and can raise offspring that don’t get hit by cars.  

Biodiversity loss on our island is real, but for now, I am soothed a bit.

I saw an otter in our pond!

Pat Foster-Turley, Ph.D., is a zoologist on Amelia Island. She welcomes your nature questions and observations. patandbucko@yahoo.com