Saving Otters, Fish, Wetlands & More

During our short drive from the airstrip to the ranch, Diane relayed what she knew about the orphaned otter. It was a young male that had been begging for fish at the Iwokrama research station for several days. The staff there had befriended him, and named him Buddy. But they were concerned about what would happen to him in the long run. He’d been hand-raised by an Amerindian family in a nearby village, along with a female giant otter. The female, probably his sister, had been killed by one of the villagers after she killed someone’s pet bird. Buddy was chased out. Since then, he’d been begging for fish along a short stretch of the river for several days.

By the time we pulled up to the main house, Diane and I had already made a plan. We would leave the next day for Iwokrama to meet Buddy, and discuss with everyone there whether or not we should move him to Karanambu. If he wasn’t too wild, we could transport him in a plastic dog kennel. Or I could anesthetize him, a prospect that made me uneasy, given the heat and other logistical challenges.

We asked the ranch manager, Ryol, if he thought the Land Rover could be ready for a road trip by the next morning. He smiled and nodded, then added that he hadn’t gotten around to fixing the last flat tire. He would get the spare fixed on the way. In this photo, Ryol is doing a little last-minute maintenance.

A big change at Karanambu since my last visit is that the ranch now has now Internet access. What a difference it makes! I immediately sent an E-mail to Iwokrama to learn more about Buddy, including how much they thought he weighed. Based on the photos they sent, we estimated the otter to be between one and two years old, and to weigh 35 pounds—about half the weight of an adult. Here is he is in a photo taken a week later at Karanambu. The boy is Denton, one of Ryol’s sons.

The research staff at Iworkrama also relayed some worrisome news: Buddy had multiple wounds around his rear end that were infested with fly larvae. Ick! They said they’d been able to pull out some of the maggots with tweezers. This didn’t make sense to me. How could they perform something so painful without giving the otter anesthesia? He must be weak, or sick, or both. (They saved the maggots so I could photograph them.)

It sounded to me as though Buddy had flystrike—an infestation of fly eggs—and maybe a bacterial infection on top of it. My guess was that these were screwworms, maggots that burrow into healthy tissue. The flies are usually found around (human) garbage and livestock pens. This would fit with Buddy’s history of having grown up in a village. Alternatively, wild otters might have attacked him at some point. They tend to go for the rear legs and tail.

Iwokrama wanted to know if they could treat the wounds with a purple fly spray marketed specifically for screwworms. Absolutely not, I e-mailed back! The product, called Mata Bicheira, Portuguese for Bug Killer, is a dangerously strong organophosphate.

The more I thought about picking maggots out of the rear end of an otter, the more I worried about Buddy’s overall condition.

The basic treatment for fly strike is just what the Iwokrama staff had begun doing: pick out the maggots. Sometimes nothing more is needed. But in severe cases, it may be necessary to anesthetize the patient and do surgery to remove damaged tissue. Anesthesia wouldn’t be easy, but at least I knew how to do it—and we had a small supply of the necessary drugs. Years ago, I’d developed a protocol for giant otter anesthesia. My first patient was Georgie, shown here, at the Georgetown Zoo in Guyana.

By six o’clock the next morning, Diane, Ryol, and I were ready. We’d packed the Land Rover with a variety of supplies, including the plastic dog kennel to use as an otter transport crate. Despite the fact that July is supposed to be one of the wettest months of the year in Guyana, it was a partly sunny morning with no rain in sight.

As we headed out across the savanna, Diane and Ryol discussed our route. Since it hadn’t been much of a rainy season so far, they decided to take a dry-season shortcut. Two minutes later, the Land Rover lurched to a halt, its tires stuck deep in a surprise patch of mud. Fortunately, we had a few passengers hitching a ride who lived nearby. Diane asked one of them to run ahead and find a few Karanambu vaqueros (cowboys) who could use their horses to pull us out of the mire. As the sun started to burn the back of my neck, I thought, no way is that going to happen. Minutes later, I was pleasantly surprised! I learned the true meaning of Horse Power, as shown in this photo.

We made it to Iworkrama after a relatively uneventful ride (we had a flat tire an hour after getting the spare repaired.) Buddy hadn’t been seen all morning, which made us all nervous. Fortunately, we didn’t have to wait long—he showed up at the boat landing an hour later, squealing for fish.

Buddy not only had a great appetite, he was also exceptionally tame—this photo was taken without a zoom—which meant that his chances of surviving around Iwokrama weren’t good. Diane and I worried that he would soon become a nuisance at the field station. If other otters didn’t kill him, there was a good chance that people would.

I was relieved to see that Buddy was generally in good health aside from the fly strike, which I couldn’t see while he remained in the water. As this photo shows, he has some old scars on his neck. There’s also a place where I can feel what I think is a fragment of a bullet or a pellet lodged under his skin. Fortunately, it’s small, and even if it’s made of lead, it shouldn’t do him any harm.

Soon I had my answer as to how anyone could safely pick maggots out of Buddy’s rear. The otter came up to the staff housing area to dry off, then curled up in a ball and began to suck on his private parts. “Oh, no, he’s a pervert!” Diane exclaimed. Absorbed in this unattractive occupation, Buddy made it easy for me to examine his wounds. We also picked out a few more maggots.
Such behavior is unfortunately common among hand-raised carnivores—otters, foxes, and raccoons, for example. It can start early as displacement nursing, or later as the animal begins to mature sexually, and can become an ingrained, or stereotypical, habit associated with boredom. As you can tell from Diane’s reaction, she’d encountered the problem before. Two of her earlier cubs, Pluto and Persephone, nursed on each other’s tails and ears for a few months, a behavior that stopped once they went wild.

With the otter on his back, I could see another problem. Buddy had worn pink, hairless areas along the inside surface of each rear leg. The problem is visible in this photo on his left rear leg. I had a pretty good idea why—it had to do with his abnormal suckling behavior, in which he repeatedly scuffed his rear feet on the ground. The fly strike made sense, too. Buddy had been keeping his rear end moist and/or exposed, and this had attracted the flies.

With the veterinary part of the exam completed, I stepped away to let Diane spend some time with Buddy. She quietly sat down near him, spread out a few often-used otter towels from Karanambu, and invited him to a drying session. She spoke softly, in her special otter voice. Though they’d been laundered, Diane knew the towels would still smell of otter to Buddy. He flung himself onto them and rolled around, drying his back and head. He and Diane became instant friends.

As the sun set, we walked Buddy down to the boat landing. The Iwokrama staff thought he’d been sleeping underneath one of the boats. This bothered Diane, who likes to give her adopted otters a safe den at night. But there was nothing we could do except continue with our rescue plan. Having met Buddy and assessed his health, we agreed that moving him to a new environment at Karanambu might be enough to break his abnormal suckling behavior. He certainly wasn’t on death’s door, despite the maggots. The move would at least get him away from the screwworm flies.

The next hurdle was to ask the village leader, or Touchou, for his recommendation. In this region of Guyana, the wildlife belongs to the local people, meaning that Buddy’s future rested with the village family who’d initially raised him. Diane planned to meet with the Touchou and the otter’s owner first thing in the morning. If everything was a go, our plan was to lure Buddy into the crate with a piece of fish. If that failed, I could easily inject him with anesthetic during one of his distracted behavior sessions.
[To be continued. . .]