554 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXIX. No. 744 



one or another kind. They are, moreover, not 

 only numerous and wide-spread, hut also fre- 

 quently joined to one another by rivulets or 

 by springy runs and bushy swamps; so that 

 they form, in effect, extended and intricate 

 systems of more or less perfectly connected 

 waterways, through which semi-aquatic crea- 

 tures like the otter can roam at will over 

 wide areas without often having to cross dry 

 land. Such conditions suit the otter per- 

 fectly. Favored by them and also, for a time, 

 by almost complete immunity from molesta- 

 tion, he throve and multiplied on the cape 

 until he had repopulated most of his ancestral 

 haunts. That the period during which he re- 

 occupied these in any number does not date 

 far back nor quite down to the present time, 

 I will now attempt to show. 



My first visits to Cape Cod were made in 

 1866 and 1867. Between 1871 and 1878 I 

 went there almost every year, sometimes in 

 spring or summer to collect the smaller birds 

 of the region or their eggs, often in late 

 autumn for the quail and duck shooting. 

 During these trips I became familiar with 

 many of the ponds and streams in Plymouth 

 and Barnstable counties. If they harbored 

 otters in any numbers at that time I failed to 

 learn of the fact, either through personal ob- 

 servation or from local hunters whom I em- 

 ployed as assistants or guides. All these 

 men agreed, if I am not mistaken in my recol- 

 lection, that the otter was then, and had been 

 for many years previously, so very rare 

 throughout the cape region that even its 

 tracks were seldom seen. About 1890 (it may 

 have been a year or two earlier or later) I be- 

 gan to hear rather frequently of otters that 

 had been seen or tracked on Cape Cod. In 

 the course of the next decade they increased 

 in numbers and extended their distribution 

 until they had become of common occurrence 

 almost everywhere from Wareham and Ply- 

 mouth to Brewster and South Yarmouth. 

 No doubt they ranged still farther eastward 

 along the cape, if not also northward to Can- 

 ton and Readville, as I have already sug- 

 gested. They seem to have reached their 

 maximum abundance about the beginning of 

 the present century. Up to this time they 



were not much molested, for they are exceed- 

 ingly wary creatures and few of the local 

 hunters knew how to capture them : but within 

 the past five or six years, as I am informed by 

 Mr. Outram Bangs, the Marshpee Indians 

 have trapped them systematically, not only 

 in the Indian Reservation near Cotuit, but 

 elsewhere over 'the cape, and with such skill 

 and success that they have been everywhere 

 very considerably reduced in numbers. When 

 they were still plentiful I saw their signs in 

 many places about the sandy or muddy mar- 

 gins of ponds, brooks and swamps in Plymouth 

 and Barnstable counties, usually in places re- 

 mote from civilization, but sometimes^ — as at 

 South Yarmouth — within a mile of village 

 centers and even nearer outlying farm- 

 houses, while I have occasionally tracked 

 them from pond to pond over high ridges 

 traversed by public roads. Mr. Bangs has 

 had still more frequent and interesting ex- 

 periences of a similar kind, for his summer 

 home at Wareham lies within easy reach of 

 many an otter-haunted pond and stream. 

 When I was visiting him there in 1900 he 

 took me one day (June 13) to a wide, swift- 

 flowing brook into which an otter, disturbed 

 by our approach, had evidently plunged only 

 a few moments before. The eddying water was 

 still roily where he had entered it and on the 

 shore we found his footprints and a dead 

 alewife that he had been eating. It was per- 

 fectly fresh and, indeed, still bleeding at the 

 point where its head had been bitten off. No 

 doubt this was the same otter that Mr. Bangs 

 had seen near the same place only a week or 

 two before and it may have been also the one 

 that he shot there some three years later (on 

 March 31, 1903), whose mounted skin is now 

 on exhibition in the Museum of Comparative 

 Zoology. 



The evidence above presented is undeniably 

 too fragmentary and' inconclusive to positively 

 discredit Mr. Gordon's suggestion that east- 

 ern Massachusetts may have been restocked, 

 within recent times, by otters that have come 

 directly from Maine and New Hampshire or 

 indirectly thence by way of the Connecticut 

 River and such eastward-flowing streams as 

 the Assabet. Indeed, I am by no means dis- 



