Spraint Watch

One of the main tools the enthusiastic otter watcher has to determine how active the otters are and where they are is to track them using Spraint or otter poo. Otters mark their territory not only to announce their presence and ownership of a stretch of river but perhaps also to give themselves signals to guide them as the traverse their territory endlessly searching for new hunting opportunities and exploring new uncharted avenues yet to be navigated.

Luckily Otter Spraint is quite distinctive although sometimes hard to find. Fortunately otters often leave their little cairns of poo in quite prominent places. As we humans like to leave human cairns - fortunately made of rocks, not poo - on the tops of large hills or mountains so otters like to leave their own markers on hills and prominent landmarks, at least from the otters point of view.

Large bolders, tussocks of grass, logs and sandbags are all common places of significance for otters. You can tell if a sprint is fresh or not by its consistancy and if you are brave enough a quick sniff will tell you whether its otter poo or than of a mink or even a fox that you have on the end of that stick. Otter poo does not smell unpleasant. It smells faintly fishy and a bit oily or musky but certainly not offensive.

A NIce fresh otter sprint example. I'll take this back and
have a go at analysing the content

To that end I have identified about 5 - 6 really good sites locally which I'll try to check regularly for fresh spraint. There are many other locations where the otters seem to spraint but these 5-6 key locations are used quite regularly so we may be able to determine some sort of pattern of movement by monitoring these. Another thing I'm also going to have a go at is spraint analysis. By looking at the bones within the sprint you can try to determine which prey species the otter is taking. This may help to determine where it is hunting or at the very least which prey animals it likes best.