Balance of Nature

Balance of Nature - Otters

We all have a vague understanding of the balance of nature. I've been experiencing the balance of nature changing year on year since I moved into this house 3 decades ago and in the half century since I moved to Lewis.

My house sits on a croft which, until around 10 years ago, was full of sheep. The croft is possibly 30 metres wide and runs from the village road to the sea. Crofts were very frequently very long and very narrow. As a consequence they are often referred to as the farming of fences (about which I have blogged several times).

The grass used to be kept under control by the croft cow (eating the long grass) and then the sheep kept the grass short. Now there are no cows and no sheep on the nearby crofts. So it's now difficult to walk down the crofts and the chance of them returning to agricultural use diminishes year by year.

This is part of the change in the balance of nature in the crofting communities which I'm hoping to write about over the next few months. Today I'm concentrating on the return of otters to the the area adjacent to my home.

Down the far side of the croft on which my house was built is a stream. When I arrived I was told the stream was an otter run from a loch well above the township to the sea below my house. Despite that and the knowledge that there are otters in the area, I know no one who has actually seen one here in all those years. That all changed a few weeks ago when someone sitting on the rocks below the house saw and photographed an otter sitting eating a fish amazingly near to him. He posted some of his photos on Facebook. With his permission I'm reproducing a few of them here.