In my generally humble opinion, one of the few justifiable excuses for Instagram to exist is an account using the handle In Otter News. A collection of funny illustrations featuring a necktie-wearing otter named Steve, as well as other otter-related images, the account is the social media face of the website of the same name, that, according to its publisher’s statement, exists for the reason that “Otters make me happy, and I’m guessing they probably have the same effect on you. Enjoy the smiles…” I do, as do quite a number of other people I’ve met. It’s hard not to be charmed by the little blighters, particularly when presented with pictures of them floating on their backs in the ocean and holding paws to keep from drifting apart.
Of course, in their real-world existence, otters are much more complex than their popularly presented representations. They can be troublesome to some other creatures at times, and in the past they were widely hunted not only for their pelts but also for the assumed depletion of fish stocks deemed valuable to humans they were said to cause (a rather grizzly depiction of such a hunt is presented by Izaak Walton in his seventeenth-century book The Compleat Angler).
In her recently published Otter Country; An Unexpected Adventure in the Natural World, noted nature writer Miriam Darlington explores the world of the otter as it is found in England, Scotland, and Wales. Spanning the course of a year on a quest to find not only otters but the people whose lives are intertwined with them, Dr. Darlington’s narrative presents the characteristic interweaving of natural history with eloquent personal essay that have made her previous books so memorable and beloved by readers around the world. It is indeed well worth the attention of all enthusiasts of otters as well as of the eloquence of fine British nature writing.
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