DECEMBER 299 



enthusiasts in that sport protest indignantly when 

 owners or lessees of salmon fishings attempt to protect 

 their property by traps against the depredations of 

 otters. I have been gravely assured by an official of 

 one of these packs that otters disliked salmon, living 

 exclusively upon eels and frogs. If he was correct, 

 then I suppose that it must have been waterhens or 

 cock-robins that slaughtered many a fine fish that I have 

 seen treated in the manner described above female 

 salmon killed in the act of spawning and the ripe ova 

 scattered along the shingle for twenty or thirty yards. 

 Frogs, indeed ! It would seem an aimless waste of 

 power if the otter's lithe build and superb speed had 

 been bestowed upon him or acquired for the pursuit of 

 sprawling batrachians. No doubt otters eat frogs as 

 readily as schoolboys eat gooseberries, but a Highland 

 salmon river is not an ideal home for frogs, and the 

 otters frequenting such a river must surely have some 

 other game in view. Eels ? undoubtedly ; and every 

 eel that the otter catches must be set to the credit of 

 his account; but he is too gallant a sportsman to 

 content himself with eels. 'The food of the otter,' 

 says Mr. L. C. K. Cameron in his excellent treatise 

 on Otters and Otter Hunting, 'is of great interest to 

 those who are asked to preserve him from an untimely 

 death by gunshot, trap, and net. It is a point upon 

 which, from time immemorial, he has been cruelly 

 maligned. . . . Fish are not the otter's only not even 

 its favourite diet.' When a statement such as this is 

 made in the very teeth of the experience of riverside 

 observers, the likeliest means of arriving at the truth 



