Love

I had a hundred things to do today, but knowing that the nice morning was forecast to give way to a wet afternoon, I abandoned them all and zoomed over to Kemerton Lake to spend an hour in the hide. When I arrived the lake was very quiet, though I was told that the otters had been seen earlier off the far bank. About half an hour later - and sadly, just after some 'newbies' who'd happened on the reserve by chance had left - I was contentedly photographing a little grebe with a fish, when two otters suddenly appeared, maybe forty or fifty metres away. The two of us left in the hide watched and waited intently and muttered quiet encouragements, as the otters gradually progressed towards us, diving every few seconds and seeming to come up chewing every time. About fifteen minutes after we'd first seen them they swept past the left side of the hide and into the reeds, by which time I'd taken 184 photos. This was roughly six times my target for the day, so I left at once, before anything else photo-worthy could happen.

While I was watching the otters I was sure that they must be last year's litter pair, but as I processed my photos I came to think that they were more probably the mother and one of the (now near-adult) pups. At this point the two of them had paused their hunting activity and were lying together in the water in a clear show of affection: cuddling, essentially, and rubbing their faces together. If my assessment is right it's the mother who's facing the camera, while the pup is in front of her, lower in the water and looking up at her. I've chosen this image for my post because it's a little different from the more usual swim-past, but it was a tough call between this and the second image in my Facebook post, which - by an otter's whisker - was R's favourite of the day.