44 THE ZOOLOGIST. 



Norfolk, has had excellent opportunities for becoming acquainted 

 with the Otter in that county.* That they are not merely nesting- 

 places used by the Otter in the day time, is proved by their being 

 lined with the flowering heads of the reeds, and also by the fact 

 that quite young Otters have been found in them. Mr. South- 

 well (I. c.) mentions one found in a reed-bed near Dilham, from 

 which four young were taken, and carried home alive ; another at 

 Hoveton Broad, from which a young one was retrieved by a dog ; 

 and a third at Barton Broad, from which the keeper took three 

 young ones. The Ranworth keepers, he says, speak of the 

 " Otter's nest" as " a heap of rough stuff collected together in a 

 reed-bed. " 



These facts furnish a curious illustration of the marvellous 

 way in which animals will adapt themselves to new or altered 

 conditions of life. In less-known exotic forms such a divergence 

 of habit might be taken to indicate a difference in species, and 

 we have no doubt that this has frequently happened in countries 

 vastly larger than our own, where examples of the same species 

 have been described as distinct for no other reason, apparently, 

 than that they have been found living a considerable distance 

 apart under different conditions of life. 



But those who have seen our Otter amidst the beautiful 

 woods and rocks of a Devonshire river, or in a salt-water loch 

 on the west coast, or in the dreary, treeless waste of reeds and 

 water in a Norfolk broad, know full well that he is the same 

 wary, watchful animal, ever on the alert, always distrustful of 

 man, displaying wonderful adaptation of structure to habits, and 

 extraordinary resource in self-preservation. 



We hear too much of the destruction of Otters. " Capture of 

 a large Otter" is the heading of a paragraph which appears 

 constantly in the columns of country newspapers ; and cui bono ? 

 Do we hear or read of any corresponding increase of fish ? Not 

 at all. If Otters were as destructive to fish as some people 

 would have us believe, their unlimited numbers before the 

 invention of shot-guns or steel-traps ought to have resulted in 

 the destruction of all the fish in our rivers. But all reflective 

 persons know that nothing of the sort has happened. The 

 enormous rate of increase in fish, as compared with the rate of 



* Trans. Norfolk & Norwich Nat. Soc. 1872-73, 



