22nd July - Well that was a first!!!

The last few Tours have been in brilliant sunshine but it was a different story last week. An annoying first half of the day as the weather forecast was completely wrong, which meant we spent a lot of time driving in thick fog, struggling to see the road let alone any wildlife! Finally I did my own forecasting, and we found a few breaks in the cloud. So lunch was spent watching a Golden Eagle also dodging the worst of the weather as it quartered the far hillside below the cloud bank.

Bad weather doesn't normally affect the Otters, so we hit a lot of territories, initially with no success. But as the afternoon drew to a close we spotted a young female swimming close inshore then disappearing behind a small headland. Moving down the road we soon picked her up again running back down the beach and into the water. She swam a little further then back on to the rocky shore where she hid amongst the boulders before returning to swim. As she faded from sight we had a quick scan for any Divers in the bay . . . and there was another Otter, about 200m out to sea! I've seen male and female Otters together and family groups, but I've never watched two distinctly separate Otters from the same place before. This Otter put on a great display fishing and diving, in fact we had to tear ourselves away eventually as time really was getting on.

I'm not sure how these two Otters fitted in to the area! Possibly a mother and cub, although they usually stick fairly close together. Maybe the first was a youngster just passing through looking for a territory of it's own? . . . . One thing is for certain . . . . I'll be back to try and work it out.