Denny Simmons

denny.simmons@courierpress.com

There isn’t much that Mike Wathen hasn’t seen in his nearly 50 years of trapping and hunting the Southern Indiana creeks, swamps and rivers. But now and again, even he is left scratching his head.

Wathen was hired to remove a band of nuisance beavers from a Northern Vanderburgh County creek but found something quite different when he checked his trap Friday morning -- river otter. A white river otter.

“I’ve never seen one,” Wathen said. “They’ve got to be rare.”

Rare was the correct word to use describing this nearly completely white male otter. With only a small patch of brown over his left eye and about four inches of brown banding his thick tail, the animal was white. The otter’s brown eyes answered the question of whether it was an albino otter. It wasn’t. Wathen’s best guess was it had leucism, a loss of pigmentation which leaves areas of white on an animal or bird.

After a quick call to the Indiana Department of Natural Resources to report his live catch and get permission to release it back into the wild, Wathen pulled away the burlap sack which was covering the trap in the back of his pickup truck. The otter wasn’t thrilled with the invasion of his privacy and paced inside the four-foot-long wire enclosure while making low grunts and occasionally spitting.

“I’m fixin’ to turn him loose right now,” Wathen said before carefully finding the trap’s handle to place it in the water for a couple of minutes to re-acclimate. Although it only weighed about 20 pounds in Wathen’s estimation, otters can inflict damage if they get a chance. Belonging to the weasel family, the otter is also closely related to the badger and wolverine. It can handle itself in a skirmish.

Wathen was quick to share the story of two trappers who didn’t treat their otter catch with enough respect. One lost part of a finger, and the other received 19 stitches.

With the otter placed about 15 feet from the water’s edge – close enough for Wathen to find refuge in the bed of his truck if the otter didn’t want to play nice – the trapper used metal rods to release the trap’s door.

“I’m going to set this pin, if I can, where the opening makes him struggle to get out the door," he said. "Having said that, I give you zero guarantees.”

An inch was all it needed and, in a white flash, the otter closed the gap from trap to water in less than two seconds. Once underwater, the otter made a quick 90-degree turn and disappeared into the green depths.

“He has the ability to swim the entire lake underwater, but I don’t think he will. You’re dealing with an animal with talents beyond what we have the ability to even grasp,” Wathen said. “I have so much respect for Mother Nature, you have no idea."