A SUFFOLK PLAN FOR OTTER CONSERVATION T H E EARL OF CRANBROOK
IN 1962 a letter 'Where are the Otters' was published in The Gamekeeper in which the writer said that one well known pack of otter hounds had only found four Otters in twenty days hunting, and that neither he nor a number of experienced otter hunters whom he had consulted had seen any otter cubs 'for a very long time'. Few naturalists read that paper, not many are otter hunters, and it wasn't until 1968 that the position of the otter became well known amongst them and the Mammal Society appointed a committee to investigate and report. Evidence was widely invited but the only numerical data came from the Otter Hunts all of whom keep hunting diaries. From those it was learned that between 1900 and 1957 all the twelve Otter Hunts in Great Britain put together had on the average hunted on 480 days a year between them on which they had found 340 otters, killing 170 of them. Over that period the number found per 100 days hunting was very consistent, varying between sixty-four in 1900 and eighty in 1947, while in 1957 it was seventy-two. Obviously the otter population had remained very stable over those years. Between 1957 and 1967 the number found per 100 days hunting had fallen by about 40% from seventy-two to forty-four and by implication the whole population by 40% also. The actual number of otters was not known, but experienced otter hunters and the few naturalists who had made any study of otters thought that the average density was about one otter for every six miles of river in the 1950s. I was brought up to believe that an otter needed between five and ten miles of river to support it. The general evidence of the hunts supported that of Lloyd that otters had ceased to breed, though there was some evidence that breeding had started again in some places. Knowing that if there were no otters there was no otter hunting, the hunts had started a new practice of continuing to look for otters but if one was found calling off the hounds without killing. In the late 1950s and early 1960s there had been a number of deaths amongst seed eating birds and amongst the predators, foxes and hawks, which fed on the dead and dying birds, and also a fall in the reproduction rate in many species of birds, sterile eggs, thin egg shells and in some cases no breeding at all. When the dead bodies and eggs were analysed they were found to contain the residues of the pesticides aldrin and dieldrin which were much used as seed dressings in agriculture particularly in the lowland arable districts where the fall in the number of otters found had been highest. In the area of the Eastern Counties Otter Hounds, which includes Suffolk, the fall had been 54%.