Hi John

Several years ago when I was living down in the Sacramento Valley I spent a lot of time at the Bobelaine Audubon Sanctuary on the Feather River. It is owed by National Audubon, and is managed for it by Seattle Audubon (I was chair of their Sanctuary committee for a couple of years). A large flood control levee separates the sanctuary and river from the surrounding valley floor. On the river side of the levee is a string of "bar" ponds where the material for ponds was borrowed. These are flooded year round and surrounded now by well developed riparian vegetation.

Every year, particularly in the spring, a family of river otters would set up shop on at least one of the ponds and gorge themselves on crawfish. I have no doubt that they also took fish from the ponds.

For those of you going down thru the Sacramento Valley this Sanctuary is a great place for birding, particularly in the spring. One year we were doing a birdathon just in the Sanctuary and picked up 90 species of birds in 2 1/2 hours. I don't know if they might still be there, but in the early 90's Yellow-billed Cuckoos could be found in the Sanctuary.

You can visit the Sacramento Audubon Society website (www.sacramentoaudubon.org) for more information and directions to Bobelaine.

Brian H. Bell
Birding & Naturaly History Guide
Woodinville WA
mail to bellasoc at isomedia dot com
----- Original Message -----
From: johntubbs at comcast.net
To: Rob Sandelin ; tweeters at u.washington.edu
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2007 1:37 PM
Subject: Re: [Tweeters] Eclipse mallards and an otter


Hi Rob and All,

Though I have not personally seen an otter take a duck, I am not in the least surprised by what you saw. I have on a number of occasions while on float trips observed a family of river otters catching fish. They are amazingly adept and very fun to watch, but we called them 'fish vacuum cleaners' because they came up with a trout on every dive and ate dozens of fish in a very short period of time - they hunted very effectively with almost no apparent effort. I have seen them on multiple occasions in the Snoqualmie Valley well away from the river itself - in one case fishing in a small lake/large pond (perhaps 2-3 acres in size). Not knowing river otters would hunt in places like a pond, I talked with the landowner of that particular pond (a retired UW biology professor emeritus), whose comment was that the river otter population is doing so well that "wherever there is any water, you will find river otters." An a! ddition al data point is that the small (actually more like tiny) creeklet that runs by my office (1 to 3 feet wide) was visited several weeks ago by three river otters who had apparently come up the tiny tributary a good half mile or more from the Sammamish River - one of our employees who grew up in Montana and definitely knows a river otter when he sees one came running in and reported the sighting.

So if I'm a hungry otter cruising a pond looking for fish, crawfish or whatever and I happen to come across a duck that can't fly or can't fly well - hey, why not!? Getting past the messy feathers is a small price to pay for a good sized meal!


John Tubbs
Snoqualmie, WA
johntubbs at comcast.net
www.tubbsphoto.com


-------------- Original message --------------
From: "Rob Sandelin" <floriferous at msn.com>

At Temple Pond at Lord Hill Park in Snohomish yesterday there was a ruckus on the far side of the pond. I could hear splashing and quacking but not see what was happening. I climbed a pond side tree to get a better view but by that time everything had settled down. Then on the edge of the lake I saw an otter eating a duck. There have been a group of 5 eclipse plumage mallards in the lake this month and yesterday I counted 3. It got me thinking about the habits of river otters and I wondered if they actually move into small lakes and ponds to pick up ducks which can not fly away.

Later that morning a Red-tail swooped down quite close to snatch a huge townsends vole from the grass. The hawk sat on the ground briefly giving me the eye, then carried its breakfast out of sight into the trees. It was a good morning in the park as I also got good looks at a coopers hawk and a pair of young weasels who kept sort of jumping over each other as they ran through the grass. Lots of interesting insects out as well.

Rob Sandelin
Naturalist, Writer
Snohomish County, WA


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