Wednesday 7 March 2012

Wild otter eating a live lamprey fish

I have posted a 45sec clip Otter eating lamprey that I filmed when we went on holiday to Devon last March 2011. We had just parked the car in the hotel car park and decided to go for a walk before checking in. As we were crossing the bridge, we heard a lot of splashing and saw some sort of commotion right in the centre of the river. We realised that an otter was making all that noise. The otter then swam to the river bank. We gathered it must have caught a fish and was going to eat it. By crossing the river and walking along the other side of the bank, we managed to get as near as it was physically possible and continued filming. By then, we could see that it was a long fish, possibly an eel, although we realised later that it was in fact a lamprey. The lamprey was still alive 20 minutes later, as you can see in the video, and the otter was struggling getting its sharp teeth through the flesh of its prey. We went for a walk and when we came back over an hour later, the otter was still munching away. Visibility was getting poor with sunset approaching so I stopped filming. The locals we met later on at the pub were very impressed and thought we were very lucky to have found an otter so quickly. They enjoyed watching the footage on the camcorder viewer.
Unfortunately, all the footage I took of the otter that day disappeared as I accidentally deleted the whole folder while "cleaning" my hard drive. Doh!
Luckily, I still have one clip, the one I have uploaded to Youtube. The reason is because I made a copy of the footage to another folder when I sent it to the BBC. Although the BBC never acknowledged receipt of my video, I am still able to share it with you through Youtube. I hope you will enjoy watching it.

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