Otter Kill Identified

Following Sunday's post which included the trail camera images of an otter with some sort of land animal kill - here - and after some discussion on Facebook about what it might have been, we decided this morning to go down to the bay to look for any remains of the kill.

Each small hummock in the area round the fresh water pool has otter spraint on it, the claws and carapaces of crabs are scattered everywhere, and the grass is flattened by their activities, and we found yet more in the thicket behind the pool, where....

....every lump of rock had spraint on it, much of it full of crunched up crab shell.

After a lot of grubbing around and squeezing into damp, inaccessible places, Rachael finally found what we were looking for, a pile of bits of skin with the spines of a hedgehog.

We then spent a damp half an hour or so sitting very still on the end of the small headland, hoping to see an otter. One duly obliged, spending much of its time fishing a hundred metres off the coast but finally....

....coming ashore just along from where we were sitting....

....much to the surprise of a gull which had been perched for some time on a nearby rock.