At night the farmers sleep, dreaming of good harvests. Their guns hang on wall racks. Their guard dogs sleep, too, unaware as a stealthy predator–not seen in most parts of the state for more than a century–scurries over the land and slips into their farm ponds.
“One morning I saw this ripple in the water,” said Richard Howell, 71, owner of the Sunnyview Catfish Farm in Downstate Payson, Ill., near the Mississippi River. “First I thought it was a muskrat. But the head was too big.”
Nearby, he found an equally mysterious sight: dozens of fish heads piled on his dock and dozens more lying in the weeds nearby.
Howell’s nighttime raider turned out to be a river otter, a species rescued from near-extinction in Illinois. Following a program in the mid-1990s to release several hundred of the animals into state waterways, the otters have rebounded with a population expected soon to reach 4,600. On Wednesday, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources removed otters from the threatened and endangered species lists.
The new designation hasn’t soothed the growing anger among some who complain that the hungry otters have binged on their catfish and left them with empty ponds. The animals retain a protected status, meaning farmers plagued by the pesky critters can apply for permits to trap and move the animals, but not kill them.
“Those otters found a smorgasbord in my pond,” said J.B. Esker, 84, who lives on 20 acres near Teutopolis, Ill. He estimates otters ate $2,000 worth of fish before he installed covers on his catfish cages, which float just below the surface of the water. “I saw an otter on top of the cage looking down at the fish. As soon as he saw me–I couldn’t shoot him–he dove down into the water.”
It’s a tense standoff and one the otters don’t make better by backstroking across ponds and diving from docks–stunts that seem only to mock the farmers who are left to stalk the banks and pick up fish heads.
Opponents of the state’s policies have warned that Illinois may be on its way to a problem the size of Missouri’s, where a release of 850 otters in 1982 has exploded to 18,000–double the target population for the state. Complaints from farmers prompted Missouri officials to open an otter-hunting season. But that only infuriated animal-rights activists.
“Otters are our No. 1 controversial animal,” said Dave Hamilton, a resource scientist for the Missouri Department of Conservation.
Highly adaptable, otters can live easily in abandoned beaver dens, roadside ditches or brush piles. They weigh up to 30 pounds, swim at speeds up to 20 m.p.h. and hunt in groups so deftly that some call them “water wolves.”
At the top of the aquatic food chain, otters have few natural predators. Besides hawks and owls, which prey on otter pups, the only predators that kill otters are people–and that’s still illegal in Illinois.
Exactly how many otters are too many is a subjective question–one typically decided from a human point of view–and no one can guess how quickly otters will reproduce.
“At some point you have a distinct decline in human tolerance,” said Bob Bluett, a wildlife biologist with the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. “That’s when you know you have too many.”
Wiped out by turn-of-the-century trapping and pollution, otters had rarely been seen in Illinois for 100 years when the state Department of Natural Resources in 1994 started its restoration program. Illinois officials bought the otters from a trapper in Louisiana, trucked the animals to the Midwest and released them 25 at a time into the Wabash, Kaskaskia and Illinois Rivers. In all, about 350 otters were released over three years.
Otters began traveling the state, in some cases moving 400 miles from their initial release sites. They went to Chicago, where they’ve been seen swimming in the Chicago River, spotted most recently near the 4700 block of Windsor Avenue, Bluett said. They’ve traveled to the suburbs, too, where they’ve been spotted in Skokie, Hoffman Estates and Elgin.
Kathy O’Brien, 56, of Arlington Heights, saw an otter jump out of an icy creek along Illinois Highway 83 while driving home from work this winter. “I thought, `Oh, my goodness,'” she said. “They’re so cute.”
Larry Weaver, 59, of Downstate Cisne, thought the otters were cute, too, until they started gobbling up his fish. He took pictures of the 30-pound catfish he found gutted in the grass and called wildlife officials to complain.
By his logic, the state released the otters, so the state should restock his pond. When officials said no, Weaver got mad.
“The state turned something loose that cost me money,” he said. “I told them it wasn’t right.”
The trapping permit available now won’t do Weaver any good. The otters left after they had eaten his fish.
Steve Cole, 45, of Bethany, Ill., southeast of Decatur, figures he might as well give up the fight. “There’s no place for the fish to go,” he said. “The otters are going to take their share just like the coyotes, the hawks and everything else. I think they’re just something we’ll have to live with now.”
