I think of our downland village as a dry place. One that sheds and percolates water away through underground chalk aquifers. There are little lacy streams and a narrow winterbourne, and if I look to history, there were mills. But it takes a week, bookended by a large riverine mammal, to change my perception.
On a damp Friday night, I receive a call from a friend, surprised and saddened to discover a dead otter on the lane. Did I think someone had dumped it? Close to midnight, my daughter and I find the place and the sad body of the animal killed by a fatal head wound. Below the lane is the slip of a small stream. We move the body, dignifying it as best we can, on to a bed of ivy, and the next morning I contact the Environment Agency to report our young female otter.
Graham Scholey, a biodiversity technical specialist and the chair of the UK Otter Biodiversity Action Plan Steering Group, comes to collect her and confirms that she was an adolescent, still with Mum. This seems an added poignancy, though I marvel that an otter has visited us at all. Graham explains that the body will be frozen, then sent for analysis at Cardiff University’s renowned, longstanding otter project, where much information is gleaned and analysed on “forever chemicals” and contaminants in our waterways, as well as disease and population biology of the otters themselves. We’re glad that some good can come of her premature, all too common, road death.
A week later, our landlord sends a video clip from the lake at the big house, one tantalising small field from home: an otter, 10 minutes ago, fishing in the early evening light and rolling in the water. It must have fossicked up the ever-narrowing River Enborne, to the lake at its springhead. I wonder if it’s our young otter’s mum, although this is a different tributary. I hurry across the field, missing the otter by minutes, my familiar landscape gleaming anew with watery braids and possibility.
• Under the Changing Skies: The Best of the Guardian’s Country Diary, 2018-2024 is published by Guardian Faber; order at guardianbookshop.com and get a 15% discount
