Nov. 9—When Nick Forman, was a kid, his chore was picking up dog poop.
Years later, collecting scat is still a big part of his job.
“It’s the worst chore in the world,” said Forman, now the small carnivore and mammal program manager for the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish. “Then I go to grad school, and my graduate school work was to go out and pick up river otter poops.”
Scat and animal fur can be used for non-invasive genetic sampling, helping researchers identify individual members of a population without having to trap or physically handle the animals. For several years, the state’s game and fish department has been working to bring back river otters to the Rio Grande, and data collected from river otter scat has been crucial in determining the size and genetic diversity of New Mexico’s growing population.
Like their marine counterparts, river otters are apex predators, dining on crayfish, frogs and fish. Part of the weasel family, river otters are smaller than sea otters but still three to four feet long with razor-sharp teeth.
Before Western expansion, “you probably had otters in most any water body that could hold fish,” Forman said. But their lush, dense fur — designed to keep the aquatic animals warm underwater — made them an attractive kill during the height of the fur trade. Unregulated trapping and habitat degradation made river otters disappear from New Mexico in the early 20th century and shrank their once-expansive range around the United States.
Between 2008 and 2010, a small number of river otters were reintroduced into the Rio Pueblo de Taos. Years later, their population had ballooned threefold, from 33 to between 83 and 100. They have been spotted from ditches in Corrales and caught on film at a front door in Angel Fire.
River otters can travel on land, especially when there’s snow, Forman said.
“For me, that tells me that our otter population, it’s not just doing well, but it’s starting to explore outside of the normal bounds that we’ve seen them,” Forman said. “The past 10 years, they’re starting to expand where we’re seeing them which, for me, tells that the population is still growing.”
But, originally sourced from Puget Sound in the state of Washington, the New Mexico otter population wasn’t very genetically diverse. Louisiana exports river otters for restoration efforts in several states, Forman said. A fan of seafood, they can cause trouble at crayfish and catfish farms in their home state.
Enter pilot Jack Long. Based in Austin, Texas, Long has been volunteering his time and Pilatus PC-12 with LightHawk, a nonprofit that organizes conservation flights, since 2011. Since his first flight transporting a rare orange-breasted falcon to Belize, he estimates he’s flown more than 50 flights with the organization, mainly transporting wildlife. The group schedules around 230 flights per year, including approximately 25 wildlife transports.
Long, a self-described “child of the Apollo moonshot generation,” thought flying was the next-best thing to becoming an astronaut. In college he worked at an airport, fueling planes to fund his flight classes, but Long didn’t buy a plane until 2008.
Long and his wife are avid conservationists involved with The Nature Conservancy. In that sense, LightHawk helped Long scratch “two itches” at once — conservation and flight.
“You could just get in the plane and fly to some other town that has a restaurant near the airport and fly back just to scratch your flying itch,” Long said. “I occasionally do that … [but] I feel good about flying, which I enjoy, but doing it in pursuit of something that I think is important.”
Wildlife transports take hours, Long said, and each flight can cost thousands of dollars.
The 2021 river otter flight was unusual for a few reasons, Long said. He typically transports birds and wolves — river otters were his first aquatic animals. And, they weren’t endangered, unlike the species LightHawk usually handles.
“They said … ‘Although its not an endangered species, these animals used to be quite prevalent in New Mexico,’ ” Long said. “And I said, ‘That sounds really interesting.’ “
Long flew from Austin to Louisiana to Taos, the otters riding in low metal crates.
Forman was present for a few otter releases. The first batch didn’t want to leave their boxes, but the second shot into the water.
“With all weasels, they’re kind of wound differently,” Forman said. “Otters will kind of bark at you and get a little uppity. … You can never tell with a weasel or an otter. I think people always think of the videos that they see online with them being playful, and they’re so smart and super curious. At the same time, they’re a 30-40 pound animal, three feet long, with super-sharp teeth for chomping down on fish — there [are] otter attacks on fishermen and kayakers and people swimming every single year across the United States.”
Forman said the population is likely still growing. Although the department has successfully reintroduced the species to fill its historic role in the ecosystem, new goals for the species can still be set. For now, Forman said, it’s nice to see otters back in New Mexico.
“I’ve gotten a half-dozen emails in the past two weeks, just of people seeing these otters out at Cochiti Lake or up at Red River,” Forman said. “It’s a cool thing that we’ve been able to bring this back and people are really enjoying the fact that they’re out there. It’s just good to also have them play their natural role.”
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