BY STUART WINTER
LOAFING around doing the backstroke in the most luxurious of swimwear looks like the life of a lottery winner. There is the finest seafood at arm’s reach and some of the most magnificent wildlife the natural world can offer to marvel at while drifting supine through crystal clear waters in a state of serene tranquillity.
Dreams of such an idyll could spark the kind of stampede to the travel agents that used to be very much a part of the New Year sales rush whipped up by Judith Chalmers’s iconic holiday programmes. For the sea otters of North America’s Pacific coastline, life on their backs is not necessarily hedonistic or slothful however.
Having the finest fur of any living creature and being able to use tools to get to food might mean they are one of evolution’s finest design models but lounging around in the surf has its choppy moments, especially when bald eagles launch hunting sorties, temperatures drop to way below freezing and killer whales live up to their name.
Focusing on the undulating fortunes of sea otters in their harshest marine domain, with its ice floes and cruel winter temperatures, is a challenge of Herculean proportions for wildlife filmmakers. For the team behind the BBC’s acclaimed Spy In The Wild series, the otter’s fraught and frigid world provides a chance to test the team’s ingenuity and technical mastery to the extreme.
Previous Spy series have seen remarkable up close and personal portraits of wild animals captured by animatronic creatures so authentic they are welcomed into their subjects’ throng as if they were part of the family. Meerkats, orangutans, monkeys and African wild dogs have all been studied at close quarters by filmmaker
John Downer’s menagerie of robotic animals fitted with cameras. Spy Otter is one of the latest creations and its intimate footage gathered from eavesdropping on the small marine mammals off the Alaskan coast when winter bites and the seas begin to freeze, reveals how their survival instincts are stretched to the limit.
I have been lucky to see sea otters from afar off the California shoreline, enough to bring a smile and produce adjectives such as cute and adorable to describe their playful antics. Spy Otter reveals a different story with amorous males ready to kidnap pups to entice their mothers into mating and bald eagles ever alert to pluck youngsters from the sea for an easy meal. Young orca also target them to practice hunting techniques.
ONE should not be surprised that sea otters have quite an armoury to help them survive. They can swim to depths of 60ft and spend more than four minutes under water, enough to travel a quarter of a mile. Using stones as anvils, they can lie in the ocean swell and smash open shellfish with alacrity. A sea otter can eat a quarter of its 100lb body weight a day to keep energised. Not having insulating blubber, sea otters need the thickest fur of any creature, with up to a million hairs per square inch to stay warm. Little wonder that pelt hunters almost drove them to extinction in the 19th century.
An international moratorium in 1911 stopped the killing but modern threats such as oil pollution, boat strikes, fishing net entanglements, parasites and disease sees them classified as Endangered on the Red List of Threatened Species. Getting greater insights into the hazards they face is vital for their conservation.
Spy In The Snow is on BBC One tonight at 7pm.