Arizona Otters

Gary Every
Wildlife Trekker
Published in
6 min readJan 12, 2022

Recently I received an email from a friend who had moved to Page, Arizona and who said that while fishing he saw a river otter climb onto shore. All the locals told him there were no otters in Lake Powell but I knew my friend knew how to identify a river otter. We had fished together many times in the Verde Valley where river otters are quite common. My friend asked, “What can you tell me about this?” Little did I know that my investigations into the subject would reveal a thriving environmental success story.

The story begins in the 1960’s with the extinction of the Sonoran river otter in the wild. No one is sure exactly when the last Sonoran river otter disappeared from the wild, but it is certain they did some time in the 1960’s. From 1981 to 1983 a reintroduction program was begun along the Verde River. Forty-six river otters were captured and imported from Louisiana before being released back into the wilds of Arizona.

I spent lots of time stomping up and down the banks of the Verde River trying to capture my first glimpse of a wild river otter. For a long time, my attempts were unsuccessful. Many of my friends saw river otters. One of my friends has a house along the shores of Oak Creek and took a picture from his back porch of five otters, a photo that appeared in the Sedona Red Rock News. The closest I came were river otter footprints in the sandy shore along Beasley Flats.

I had seen sea otters before. I still remember the scene. I was standing on the docks of Valdez, Alaska watching industrial ships come in and out of the harbor, the bay surrounded by towering jagged edged mountains holding glaciers. Floating just off the docks was a small pod of otters. They were diving beneath the water’s surface and returning to float on their backs and open some sort of shellfish. It was delightful to watch. I spent a lot of time stomping up and down the thick brush of riverbanks of Arizona in my quest to get a glimpse of a river otter.

My efforts were rewarded unexpectedly, deep inside Sycamore Canyon outside Clarkdale. I was not even looking for otters, I was deep inside a narrow canyon and far from the main river. I approached a stream crossing and heard a sudden splashing. A large, long and slender mammal stood up on its hind legs for just a moment before scurrying into the nearest thicket. The otter and I stood there staring at each other across the stream and through the bushes. I kept pointing my camera and focusing but I already knew that all I would get was a good photo of a thicket. In the attempt to get a better photograph, I marched forward and scared the otter from the bushes. The otter fled upstream at an astonishing rate of speed. Later on, the trail crested a hill, and I could see a large pool of water in the distance ahead where a pair of otters frolicked and swam. I have seen river otters in the Verde Valley several times since but always with the same amount of photographic success. The otters are pretty fast.

One time I was sitting and reading along the shores of Oak Creek in Page Springs and suddenly a beaver went swimming past. The beaver never knew I was there and if I had stretched out my legs, I probably could have kicked it. The beaver swam by so quickly that I never had a chance to get my camera out, but it was the first wild beaver I had ever seen in Arizona. There is a stretch of the Verde River in Cottonwood where I know of a family of beavers who produce a new kit every year. Beavers and otter in the same river is quite a treat. I have had a little better luck with beaver photographs than otter but not much. One sunrise when the beeping of my autofocus scared the family of beavers as they dove into the water with a loud splash, I cursed my luck and looked up to see a family of five raccoons in a cottonwood tree.

The sad news is that the Verde River has become a threatened resource, many hydrologists believe that a water treatment plant scheduled for Prescott and Prescott Valley, could change the Verde River into a dry arroyo in fifty to seventy-five years. The loss of habitat could push beaver and otter populations back into endangered status once again.

The Sonoran river otters used to swim as far north as Lake Powell but of course it wasn’t Lake Powell back then, it was Glenn Canyon. Back before the dams were built, the Sonoran river otters could traverse a network of riparian zones; the Gila, Salt, Verde, and Colorado rivers, and cover much of the southwest.

The dams shut down some of these waterways or at best made long distance travel much more difficult and riskier. When the Sonoran river otters went extinct, they disappeared from Glen Canyon and then later in Lake Powell.

The Cajun otters released into the Verde River have thrived spreading into Oak Creek, Sycamore Canyon, Clear Creek and others. My first wild otter sighting in Arizona took place deep in Sycamore Canyon but my favorite otter experience took place at Bignotti Beach along the Verde River. I had been spending almost every day off work sunrise at the beach attempting to photograph a beaver den I had discovered. I had been doing this about two and a half years when one morning an otter showed up. The otter moved through much differently than the beaver. What an acrobat. Arizona Game and Fish had recently released naive fish into the river there. The otter seemed to be feasting. The otter was there every morning for a couple weeks. On a crisp and chill, foggy New Year’s morning and suddenly there were four otters. The pack of otters were fishing up a storm. Again and again, an otter would come up for breath with a sharp huff and dive back below the water. Little puffs of vapor would appear with every breath, remaining after the otter had submerged.

There is no sign these Verde River otters have made the journey all the way down to the Colorado River and then hundreds of miles upstream, including the Grand Canyon, before scaling hundreds of feet up Glen Canyon dam.

However, in the 1990s northern river otters were released into the Escalante Wilderness in Utah. These otters have made their way down the San Juan, Green, and Colorado Rivers before making new homes in Lake Powell. Having watched the acrobatic mammals frolic in the river, I can easily imagine otters from one direction or the other crossing that damned dam, intermingling and enhancing genetic diversity with a great deal of enthusiasm. It warms my heart to see how successful river otter reintroduction has been in the southwest and all I can do is cheer for the cute little critters. Go otters!

--

--

Gary Every
Wildlife Trekker

Gary Every is the author severl books including “The Saint and the Robot” “Inca Butterflies” and has been nominated for the Rhysling Award 7 times