Animals Just Being Animals And Vexing Humans Along The Way

ACROSS AMERICA — The so-called surfboard-stealing Otter 841 continues to live a sea otter’s best life, swimming off the coast of Santa Cruz, California, and, to the delight of her social media fans, eluding wildlife officials who want to capture and take her to the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

California state and Monterey Bay Aquarium wildlife officials have been tracking Otter 841 since September 2021 after getting multiple reports she was harassing surfers.

Or is it the other way around?

The southern sea otter’s aggressive behavior “may be associated with hormonal surges … or due to being fed by humans,” Jess Fujii, who manages the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s sea otter program, told The Cambridge, a publication of the San Luis Obispo Tribune.

In other words, it’s us, not Otter 841. We’re in her world, not the other way around. She’s just a sea otter being a sea otter, just as a river otter that bit a swimmer’s butt last month was just being a river otter.

“Succession” actress Debra Messing and one of her co-stars, Crystal Finn, were swimming in a river in northern California when an otter nipped at Messing’s butt. Finn said three other otters attacked her.

“They were all coming for me,” Finn told The Mercury News of the encounter. “It seemed rather orchestrated.”

About 100 miles south a couple of days earlier, a swimmer was bitten by an otter 10 or 15 times in Serenes Lake, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. And earlier this month, a woman had to be airlifted to the hospital after she and two others were injured by otters while floating in inner tubes on a southern Montana river.

Here’s the thing: For otters and other animals, including the ocean’s apex predator the orca, humans are the biggest predator of all. When otters feel threatened by a predator, they bite. It’s even otter-mating behavior.

The rash of human-otter conflicts this summer is unusual, Megan Isador, the River Otter Ecology Project’s executive director, told The Mercury News. “When otters attack, it’s most often because they have young nearby and feel threatened.”

Bears Being Bears

Human-animal conflicts are becoming more common as cities and suburbs sprawl into animals’ habitats. Here are a couple of stories from Patch that illustrate that:

Bear Reform School? A black bear and her three cubs in the fast-growing South Lake Tahoe area have troubles similar to Otter 841’s and are facing deportation. DNA samples show the bear family has broken into 21 homes since last year, California wildlife officials said.

Mama bear is likely going to a wildlife sanctuary near Springfield, Colorado, and the cubs could end up at a rehabilitation facility in Sonoma County, California, “in hopes they can discontinue the negative behaviors they learned from the sow and can be returned to the wild,” the state Department of Fish and Wildlife statement said.

The Year Of The Bear: Connecticut’s black bear population has rebounded in what state wildlife officials call a conservation success story, but it’s increasing the number of bear nuisance calls. Last year alone, wildlife officials fielded reports about bears from 158 of the state’s 169 towns and cities last year.

This year could be another year of the bear. A black bear and one of her three cubs were inside a home when police in Canton responded to a call in June. The adult bear, which didn’t have a record of aggression, was tranquilized and was expected to be released back into the wild.

Humans Capture, Others Liberate

Sometimes, humans stop animals from being the animals they were meant to be. And the attempts to give them a better life may be misguided.

What The Heck With These Mink? About 3,000 mink escaped through a cut in the fencing around their enclosure in Wisconsin, where it’s legal to farm mink for their silky fur. Allowed to be themselves, mink are loners and normally come together only to mate, but when they were given a chance it freedom, it may not have turned out well.

In a mink liberation gone horribly wrong several years ago in neighboring Minnesota, most of the 40,000 animals set free died in the heat, and those recovered “were haphazardly thrown into pens, which disrupted their social groupings and drove the minks to kill one another,” Slate wrote of the 2017 incident.

Keep Your Distance

At other times, people are so giddy about getting a closeup shot of wild, dangeorus animals that they put themselves in harm’s way.

Do Not Pet The Fluffy Cows: The internet meme was borne of the frequency with which tourists aim for the perfect photo and aggravate bison.

In one incident in June 2022, an Ohio woman died after a bison tossed her 10 feet in the air at Yellowstone National Park. A Colorado Springs man and his family were walking on a boardwalk near the Giant Geyser at Old Faithful later that month when a bull bison charged the group and gored the man. He was taken by ambulance to an eastern Idaho hospital with an arm wound. In an unprovoked attack a day later, a 71-year-old Pennsylvania woman survived her injuries after she was gored by a bison as she and her daughter were returning to their vehicle parked at a trailhead.

Earlier this year, a Minnesota woman was injured by a bison at Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota.

“Park staff would like to remind visitors that bison are large, powerful, and wild,” the park service said in a statement. “They can turn quickly and can easily outrun humans. Bulls can be aggressive during the rutting season, mid-July through August. Use extra caution and give them additional space during this time.”

Bison, after all, are just being bison.