OTTER. The very name signifies water in the long-forgotten roots of the
English language. Their amphibious lifestyle was once so familiar that
Shakespeare had Falstaff liken one slippery character, “neither fish nor flesh”,
to an otter. And a manuscript from 1654 reveals that “a Knight, half-Spiritual,
half-Temporal” was a kind of otter, too.
Yet by the late 1970s, otters were no longer in the mainstream of Britain’s
landscape—neither the literary nor the literal one. In fact, they had very
nearly become wholly spiritual. Otters looked like joining the ranks of beavers,
bears, wolves and wild boars as British has-beens.…
