Otterly fantastic

Sorry for abandoning you through November, but it's my busiest month and I barely got time to pick up my camera other than to photograph beads.

No pictures in this post either, but I wanted to report some progress in my quest to photograph otters. I have a veg patch with a view - it's in our bottom field, so it looks out over the bay. On Sunday morning I was happily getting on with digging it over (my neighbour kindly drove two tons of well-rotted manure down there for me over the summer and it needs to go on) when something caught my eye in the water. It was a flat calm day and the tide was high and there were two otters fishing in the shallows. I watched them for about half an hour.

After lunch today the sky was blue and all the work that really, really HAD to be done was done, so I went back to my manure-spreading. The veg patch is in the bottom corner of the field, next to our fence. There's a steep bank and our neighbour on the other side has fenced about 20 feet of flat ground off for vegetables before there's another, flatter, bank. In this flatter bank is a large rabbit hole, which the dogs always go and investigate when we're down there. Today I saw what I thought was a cat sitting in the grass beside it. My brain was telling me there was something odd about the shape of its head, so I looked again - and saw the second otter emerging from the hole! The first otter bounced off past the neighbour's gate and down to the beach and the second one disappeared back down the hole - so I think we may be on for cubs next year!