Steve Ahillen

Knoxville

Ryan Duley heard some splashing along Third Creek on a recent afternoon and wondered who was playing in the water.

It was hot. He had taken his infant son out for a stroller ride on the Third Creek Greenway and he was at the wooden bridge near where the Sutherland Avenue access trail joins the main route.

Imagine his surprise to find three otters splashing about.

“They swam over to see me, but my son cried in his stroller, and they turned and went back to whatever they were doing,” Duley said. “I picked my son up and we watched for a minute, but it was hot so we didn’t stay long.”

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He said he hasn’t heard of anyone else spotting the otters and he hasn’t been back to that area of the creek.

Otter sightings in the Knoxville area are rare, but hardly unheard of.

“It is not unusual or unexpected to see otters in the water around here,” said Craig Harper, University of Tennessee professor and extension wildlife specialist. “They flourish in areas with sufficient amounts of fish.”

“(The Duleys) were lucky to see something like that,” said Mike McMillan of McMillan Wildlife Control Service.

“You can sometimes see otters around marinas or other places on a lake all day, but to see three on a creek in the middle of the day is unusual. They usually come out in the evening when no one is around.”

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McMillan said at this time of year it's likely the trio were a mother teaching her two offspring to hunt.

Jake Hudson with Ijams Nature Center has been cleaning up trash at the mouths of the three creeks in downtown Knoxville for several years and estimated he has seen four otters in that time. He said he recently found a dead otter.

The Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency began restocking river otters in the state in 1984, releasing otters into the Obed Wild and Scenic River area.

The animal was reintroduced to major river systems beginning in 1993, and was taken off the endangered species list in 1999.

TWRA does not keep track of the otter population numbers in East Tennessee, but the agency's Dan Gibbs said they are common across the area.

"They were stocked back in the 1990s which is before my time, but I doubt they were stocked in Knox County. They just sort of found their way there," he said.

Gibbs added that now they are liable to show up almost anywhere.

"We usually hear about them when they are eating the fish out of someone's pond," he said, "when it's a nuisance thing."