Editorial Content for Otter Country: An Unexpected Adventure in the Natural World

You probably know someone who is fixated --- maybe even borderline obsessed --- with seeing a certain animal. For many people, it’s a particular bird: a pileated woodpecker, an owl in flight. But for others, it’s an elusive mammal: a blue whale, a moose, a fisher. In nature writer Miriam Darlington’s case, the object of her fixation is the otter. She’s so keen on finding this slippery animal that on several occasions she calls it her “grail.”

Darlington, who lives in the United Kingdom, first sees an otter in the remote and harshly beautiful Scottish Highlands, the setting for a book (and later movie) about otters, RING OF BRIGHT WATER. But when she returns home to Devon, in the south of England, she discovers almost by accident that there are otters closer to home. Although still fiendishly difficult to find in the wild, they are dispersed throughout the wild river landscapes of Great Britain. So she sets off to find as many of these habitats as she can, to look for otters and their signs, and to reflect on what their existence means about the habitats they call home.

"Although Darlington is clearly a skilled observer and tracker of otters, her writing really shines in her descriptions of the landscape."

Over the course of nine chapters --- each of which, for the most part, can stand on its own as a kind of extended nature essay --- Darlington explores these landscapes, often alone but also in the company of others who have written about otters, studied them or worked to ensure their continued survival. After years of being hunted almost to extinction, otters are again flourishing, but she urges readers not to take that for granted.

Those who might be expecting a blend of nature writing and memoir (à la H IS FOR HAWK) will need to adjust their assumptions. Darlington herself is a secondary figure in her narrative, offering only brief glimpses into her personal life, and no profound connections between the animals she observes and any kind of larger meaning. But perhaps that is a purer kind of nature writing, one that takes the natural world on its own terms rather than trying to conform it to human shapes.

Although Darlington is clearly a skilled observer and tracker of otters, her writing really shines in her descriptions of the landscape. Here she describes the river Fowey in Cornwall as active, dynamic and full of life: “It shoulders and slumps round boulders, carving steeply into its own valley, riding round bends, soaking into reedy marshes where elvers and frogs thrive.” Elsewhere, she describes animal tracks as a way of revealing the life that surrounds her: “The mud is doodled all over with aimless wanderings: tiny, scribbled bird prints; erratic circlings of some small mammal. Further on, it’s pimpled with a million worm casts, and I can see where a fox has been trotting on sticky paws to the water.”

At times, the details Darlington provides about otters can grow repetitious. One wonders if some of these well-realized chapters were published separately before being combined into a cohesive book-length narrative, as some statistics and descriptions occur multiple times. But despite this slight weakness in editing, OTTER COUNTRY, which was published a dozen years ago in the UK, now allows US readers to take a vicarious journey into some of the varied landscapes of Darlington’s home country and share in a bit of her fondness for these complicated creatures.