Years ago, my family took a tour at Abbot’s Lagoon with Megan Isadore, who co-founded the River Otter Ecology Project, to learn about and see the river otters that live and thrive there.  This time of year you can see the new babies.  Today there’s an article on a new behavior.  The otters are augmenting their diet with pelicans.  Researchers are wondering how the pelican’s capture and eating behavior spread from Rodeo Lagoon in the Marin Headlands to Abbott’s Lagoon in Point Reyes, a distance of fifty miles.

I’m reminded of Sutro Sam.  In late 2012 and early 2013, Sutro Sam showed up in a protected freshwater-fed pool within the ruins of Sutro Baths in San Francisco.  River otters hadn’t been seen in San Francisco in decades but there was Sutro Sam frolicing in glee because the ruins were stocked with large pet goldfish released by locals.  Because he had a tracker, they knew he swam across the bay from Marin.

Recently I learned of mice who were caught in Nicasio and released near a Mill Valley creek.  They found their way back to Nicasio.  The proof was on their tails that had been spray-painted pink.

When I read the article, I thought perhaps the information had spread through some special otter news network, but remembering Sutro Sam, I thought of Louis and Clark, and adventurers like George Mallory who wanted to climb Mount Everest “because it is there”.  Sir Edmund Hillary said, “It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves”.  Otters, like humans, are curious animals, and they’re showing us they, too, like to explore.

Or maybe it is a certain individual, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, or one who links to the Australian Aboriginal rite of passage where a young one goes out alone on a Walkabout, a spiritual journey to become an adult.  

Here’s the article: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/otters-pelicans-point-reyes-22361117.php