By Elaine Miller Bond
Camera in hand, Jen Joynt goes out to Bay Area parks, “looking for excitement.”
On a day last winter she started from the Tilden Nature Area, just looking for what she could see. She hiked up Wildcat Peak, where she found and photographed a pair of coyotes. As she headed back, she happened to meet birdwatchers she knew from previous outings. And they turned her afternoon of picture-taking into a brush with Tilden history: they asked if she had seen the otter.
“Oh no, I hadn’t seen the otter!”
Joynt’s mind went to the Tilden otters from two years ago — four of them observed for about a week in 2009. Prior to that, river otters had last been sighted in Tilden, according to park records, during the 1940s.
By the time Joynt rushed down the trail to Jewel Lake, the rarely seen animal had slipped into the cattails for the night. Looking, now, for otter excitement, Joynt ventured out early the next morning — and waited. Finally, around 10:00am, the animal glided out into open water.
“The otter was a little bit curious,” she said. “Sometimes it would swim right by and pop its head up.”
Three groups of schoolchildren also visited Jewel Lake that morning. Yet, the otter kept swimming around the lake, hunting and taking occasional peeks at onlookers. Joynt went on to watch the otter several times over the winter, as it caught a bounty of fish and crayfish and even used small platforms in the lake as a dinner table for prey flopping in its jaws.
She headed to the lake many times in November and December 2011 and in January 2012, usually in the mornings or late afternoons.
Despite the otter’s appetite, Jewel Lake remains healthy with fish, according to park naturalist Gail Broesder (also known as “Trail Gail”), who notes the rich birdlife still thriving there. Three otters, in fact, may have gone fishing in Tilden’s Jewel Lake and Lake Anza between November and January.
Otter sightings were also made miles away, on the other side of Wildcat Canyon, in Richmond’s Alvarado Park. Broesder believes that a small number of river otters are traversing the watershed, creek-by-creek — which is one more reason to leave streams unchannelized.
“Otters are such a pleasure to watch,” says Joynt. “They’re so smooth in the water.”
No-one knows for sure why these playful predators came and went from Tilden Park. And, whether otters have moved on for another year or two or sixty, it is fun to capture their spirit of curiosity and keep going out, looking for excitement.
For more wildlife photographs by Jen Joynt, visit her site The Owl and the Wildcat.
Elaine Miller Bond is the author of “Dream Affimals (Affirmations + Animals): Inspiration to Fulfill Your Wildest Dreams” (Sunstone Press, targeted for later this year), and photographer for the upcoming book, “The Utah Prairie Dog,” by Theodore Manno and John L. Hoogland (University of Utah Press, for 2013).
Related:
Berkeley owl family grows, more reports of dog swoops [04.02.12]
Up close with Berkeley’s wildlife at Tilden Regional Park [03.06.12]
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