Ring of Bright Water helped save Scotland’s otters. Now we must save all life from mass extinction crisis

If we are honest, our first sexual experience is often unmemorable: fumbled, awkward, and brief. But everyone remembers their first otter.

I was a desperate otter virgin for years. I spent a lot of time staring at seaweed. As a lonely teen on Bute, where my great-aunt hosted us most summers, I would nip out onto the beach hoping to meet a handsome, dark-eyed stranger with sleek fur and a long tail. Alas, all I saw were cheeky herring gulls trying to chat me up for a crisp.

A mother otter with her cub on a shoreline in Shetland | Getty Images/iStockphoto

I was entranced by Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water, in which he recounted how, walking his pet otter in London, passers-by wondered aloud if it was “a walrus” or “a hippopotamus”. To an Edinburgh child, otters were almost as exotic. They torqued through the current of my wildest dreams.

Halfway to fairyland

I was 30 before I finally got waylaid, on Mull. Remembering what Bryan at Pennyghael Post Office had told me, I walked alone along Loch Scridain on one of those mystically clear days, when the sky is as open as an unmade bed and the slap of water on the shore plays bass to the wind’s muffled lyrics.

I’d been advised to scan the water for something resembling a log drifting too fast. Eventually, there would be an upward tail-flick and it would disappear. That was an otter, fishing. My job, once I’d spotted it, was to seek the line where it would come to land. If I could keep upwind and stay hidden, I’d have a chance of catching the otter on the rocks, feasting on a butterfish or a crab.

So I gazed out into the loch, looking for logs. I became mesmerised. Island light will do that to you: the mother-of-pearl gleam of the horizon. I was halfway to fairyland when I had that odd sensation you get when you feel someone’s gaze on the fine hairs of your skin.

Heart beating for a beast

I turned to the path in front of me and there, not three feet away, was an otter. A large, dog otter. His face expressed curiosity, even amusement. I was a galumphing weirdo in a red kagool. He was continuous with the elements in which he lived. His muscular body could bend water, his tail flexible as ink. His peat-brown pelt was wet-combed over the hummock of his haunches. The antennae of his magnificent whiskers radioed the air. Our staring match lasted minutes at most. But I was changed. My heart beat for a beast.

What does it mean to be truly alive? For me, such encounters are at the heart of the mystery. When we step beyond the glass that separates, for most of us, our working lives from the ‘outside’: and suddenly breathe a sharper air, of vulnerability and wonder. If there is magic in the world, it is here, where trees become deer, the paintbrush of a red squirrel’s tail flows over the branch, and a birch explodes in a roman candle of shaking golden leaves.

In my childhood, otters were treated as vermin: hunted, trapped and wrecked by DDT. Now there are some 8,000 in Scotland, including the Clyde and Water of Leith. Scottish nature writing powered that transition.

The romantic and the real

Gavin Maxwell was a mercurial adventurer, a troubled Romantic. His idyll at Sandaig Bay, where he wrote Ring of Bright Water (1960), depended on fenced enclosures and eels transported by train from London. Yet his love for otters changed the world. By 1979, they were legally protected.

The power of Maxwell’s words to re-shape the otter’s future gives me hope that there can be a positive relationship between the Romantic and the real, the visionary and the practical. If we can conjure it, we can bring it into being.

Now we face an even worse crisis. The World Wildlife Fund reports a 73 per cent decline in wildlife populations in the last 50 years. We are barrelling toward levels of global warming above two degrees Celsius, terrifyingly soon, that threaten food and water security, and violent extremes of weather, presaging conflict and loss.

But turning away in despair is futile. This new article series aims instead to turn towards the wildlife and landscapes we love, to air green ideas and constructive debate.

Dr Sara Lodge's first encounter with an otter was a memorable one | Danny Green - 202VISION

Being on nature’s side

We are at war. And we need to change sides. Rather than being part of the Axis powers who swallow resources as if there were no tomorrow, we need to join the Allies, straining every nerve and fibre to save our shared life-support system from destruction. But, make no mistake, this cannot be a ‘niche issue’ or a weekend pursuit. It is everything. For all of us. It won’t be easy.

Systemically, we’re surrounded by a global shopping channel’s frantic broadcasts. We see a mirage of product abundance designed to keep from us the reality of dearth and death that the endless churn of commerce inflicts on the biosphere. Conserving energy, food, water is a habit we’ve forgotten.

You don’t win a war without sacrifice, without putting survival at the heart of every single decision you make as a person, a company, a country. We must do this now. From making renewables our chief investment to making public transport cheaper than private; from backing green agriculture to banning plastic packaging on food; from ending raptor persecution and destructive seabed trawling, to treating all land – private or public – as a shared covenant that must be carried forward in the interests of nature.

Scotland is a brave country with a long history of genius and innovation, but also of being unafraid to do the right thing: from educating women doctors to pioneering the smoking ban. Now, we face the most existential threat of all. Will we be equal to our moment?

The otter holds my gaze, still. I make a silent promise. Then he slides into the loch and disappears.

Dr Sara Lodge is a senior lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews