When you get to see an animal really up close and notice every detail of its make-up the overpowering feeling you get, apart from its physicality, is just how amazingly designed for their lives they appear to be.
You can understand how people have so readily explained this through the shaping hand of a divine being. The slow push and pull of evolutionary adaptation to the finer demands of a habitat and competition, seem too slow and inadequate for such evident sophistication.
We forge an impression of what animals should look like from media pictures seen and film footage and from previous encounters not so intimate and through the words we have read and heard. And whilst these general impressions hold tight, when you get in really close with eyes and binoculars and camera, our human noticing really kicks in on a different level, it’s like we have seen the thing for the first time, invented them for ourselves in that moment, even if we are already familiar with the species.
In close, we notice things we have never previously seen and new behaviours, ways of moving and being, that are too subtle at distance, or even on a screen. If it is a repeated encounter with an individual or several then we start to see that, what at first look like identical clones, are in fact all uniquely different and have distinguishing marks and characters. This can apply as much to fish, and invertebrates and even flora, certainly trees, as it does to mammals and birds.
There is no substitute for seeing wildlife yourself, and literally making your own mind up about how they look. However many great Attenborough films you have seen, until you’ve seen it yourself, you haven’t really ‘seen’ it, something is always lost in translation. This is the drive behind zoo and farm encounter experiences that are designed to bring people safely close to even very dangerous and unusual, very rare and also domesticated animals, exploiting our innate fascination and curiosity about animals’ looks and behaviours. But there is no substitute ultimately for observing life in the wild. And thus, the reason all those nature lovers and birders who go to great lengths to see and enjoy as many birds or animals that excite them as they can, people like me!
We do it because it is addictive and we are obsessed, we get a dopamine hit from seeing the difference between our reality and the lesser reality of onscreen life, linked to our base skills as hunters. What is actually, truly, ‘real’ at all, don’t ask me, but I know 3D in the wild is the best I can see and feel as a human. Again, it is what we were built for, we are the noticing apes, the bipedal, smart brained, watchers.
When I and my photographer partner finally succeeded in trailing and getting very close to a swimming, fishing, playing and resting otter, on a remote Scottish coastline, it perfectly illustrated the effect such an encounter has on us and how it makes us react. It was far from our first otter but it felt as if it was.
Completely immersed in the unexpected closeness without a camera, I was drawn in, my brain spilling forth words and phrases in some attempt to describe the minute and the magic of what an otter looked like then and there; something so simple-complex-subtle and complete, that we compute and distil into ‘otter’, but which is still so inadequate in being able to capture its overall aliveness. And despite all the wonderful photos my partner took, even videos, there remained something of the moment and of the creature forever unreconciled; some things just cannot be captured
I also realised that every future experience of otter would never be the same, however close or distant. My next experience, yours, will be different again, every time, this is the way we see things.
This particular otter in this particular time appeared to our right, where we were sat on the beach admiring the late afternoon view. We had seen her most days, but always too far to see detail or take decent pictures. She was entertaining though, graceful and agile in the water, sleek and smooth out of it, just so cute and seeming to change shape as she flowed through her different micro habitats along the shore and in the sea as she hunted a surprising range of fish and crustaceans.
‘She’, it was a female with young cubs we had reckoned, came out of her favourite enlarged rabbit hole and walked fast through the rocks to the beach. Appearing just 30 feet away, she caught us unawares, though she was as big as a medium sized dog, and was in the sea before we could take her fully in.
But we managed to trail her slow exploration of the shore and get in front of her as she came to her favourite feeding place by the rocks on the other side of the little bay. We could watch her then for 90 minutes at mostly very close range, the wind was towards us, there was no scent to spook her, she appeared to stare at us now and then, but couldn’t make us out and carried on her natural behaviour unaffected by any human behaviour, though she may have sensed our excitement.
It was an intense time, much more absorbing than any football game of the same length I’d watched; by the end of it we felt like we’d been there in the rock pools and seas with her, had to lie down to recover! It had been an animistic, totemic, revelation of otter. Somehow, in those moments, it had got into us and we into it and felt its very being, we had become ‘otterly possessed’.
We had though inevitably also experienced it all slightly differently between us too, as we humans do. We can never put ourselves entirely into someone else’s head or eyes or of those of another creature, but we get a feeling of dual perception sometimes if we are lucky, especially when we share things up close in special circumstances, as we sew things together in our human ‘mind-made theatres of life’.
The thing is, when we fully encounter any living creature, even another human, or even gaze at a landscape, we make it up on the spot every time, even imagining the bits we don’t really see, to fill in the gaps; everything is a dynamic abstract personal, sometimes interpersonal creation, of ‘what is’. We may be the seers and noticers by design, but we are also the projectors.
This is how it looked to me at that time and place;
Water droplets on whiskers rise above a briny furred throat-mane of riffled chocolate fur, a mind-bending face in a shape shifting body; chewing like the devil might on some unfortunate butter-paws-slippery, seemingly elastic, fish.
Shining eyes, black as winkles, focus dimly on distance, pinned deep into that old leather boxing glove of a mush, with its perfect white teeth and crimson mouth. Then a bryl-creamed slick backed fur out of water; a sturdy cone tailed whiskered sea cat with flipper webbed badger feet; a moving curve of sea and land, brown then grey and white between boulders; a long tube dog on long legs, moving fast, that somehow fits down a rabbit hole, in a cliff.
A porpoising marine hound, pulling fish from the water like rubber strings; chomping and gagging on writhing butterfish, crab crunching; a dark shape coalescing with sea spray; a silhouette materialising on a beach; tiny eared and flat cap pushed tight over squinting eyes; a moving piece of rock pool slicked in bladderwrack; sea serpents spiralling in turbulent waters; plodding tired up the hill to bed; a blade of gold sleeking along the tideline.
A small bobbing head in the distance transformed to a tail; chin up riding the waves; flat packed head half hidden in an octopus face mask; a sleek form with a large white plaice for a head; curve on curve on curve through seas; surfacing like a mini Nessie; large cub, small parent, tying themselves together in Celtic knots; a curl of wet fur on a distant rock; voracious predator greedy for fish; a crusading survivalist battling the waves.
More closely still; I had never appreciated the texture of otter muzzle until now, some sort of spongy quill holder for glass tendril whiskers, the whole a unit of itself, moving as one piece, flexing as it is put to multiple uses, reshaping as it changes function; there are the subtle cut off curves of smooth eyebrows, the rubberised texture of the nose, the whole blur of each part working together seamlessly.
The black pads of paws holding fish or rubbing head, neatly trimmed claws with bits of purple urchin stain; a small tare in left ear rim from an old crab claw leaving its mark; one eye glassy, one darkly focussed, changing as the head moves; wet thick fur turning slick as mud on merest touch of water.
And close observation brings insight; those water droplet whiskers, tiny globes of sea-light pearled on otter’s face, contain all the essences of an ocean.
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