272
NOTES.
Food of the Otter.—Much ignorance appearing to prevail on this subject, as
evidenced by the ruthless way in which otters are slaughtered in the supposed
interests of fishery proprietors, it may be well to quote the following passages from
some interesting articles on "Rapacious Animals in East Anglia" which have
recently appeared in the "East Anglian Daily Times." The author thus writes
of the otter :—"There is abundant proof that the diet of the otter is a mixed one,
consisting of fish (especially eels, which are said to destroy vast quantities of the
ova of other and more valuable fish), frogs, water-rats, and other small quadrupeds,
aquatic birds, snails and other molluscs. According to the late Mr. E. R. Alston,
F.Z.S., the stomach of one killed in June, examined by Macgillivray, was full of
larvae and earth worms. A correspondent of the 'Field,' alluding to otter
hunting, says :—'When hunting a trail, it will be found constantly to diverge
some distance from the river up a damp ditch or water-course, and the common
remark may be heard, 'Ah, he has gone up there 'frogging.' " The same writer
further on quotes the following remark of the Hon. Geoffrey Hill from the
Badmington Library of Sports and Pastimes:—'Otters are not decreased in any
way on my rivers ; they are better preserved than they used to be, for people are
beginning to find out that they kill and keep down the coarse fish and eels, which
live on the spawn and fry of the better sort.' As to eels, they swarm in all our
rivers, ditches and ponds to such an extent that, supposing the existing number of
otters to be doubled, these animals could hardly, I think, make any perceptible
reduction in their numbers. Again, Mr. T. E. Davies, in a communication to the
same paper, says :—'A friend told me he had an otter which would follow him
about the country, and that it would hunt all the wet places it came to for frogs
which it greedily devoured ; and a miller told me he had seen an otter hunting a
field below the mill, as he thought, for frogs and snails.' Nor does this animal
confine itself entirely to an animal diet, but is a partial vegetarian. Mr. W.
Cartmel, secretary to the Kendal Otter Hounds ('Field,' Nov. 5th, 1887), says:
'Otters will eat celery, potatoes, young shoots from thorn hedges, and have a
specially great liking for the first two.' That otters destroy a certain proportion
of fish is, of course, indisputable, but the harm they do is unquestionably much
less than is generally supposed, and certainly not sufficient to justify the treatment
they too often meet with. The following is an extract from a note on this subject
in the 'Field,' Feb. 5th, 1887 : 'An experience of a quarter of a century on a
trout and salmon river, where otters were numerous and fish always plentiful to
anglers who knew how to catch them, has convinced me that the otter and the
trout, and salmon too, can live side by side.....Did those correspon-
dents who advocate the unsportsmanlike practice which has caused this note (the
trapping and shooting of otters) know the little river Bela, in Westmorland, a few
yards wide only, which literally teems with trout, and in whose banks, for some
six miles, two or three litters of otters are reared every year, they would say no more
about the destruction wrought amongst fish by this most interesting amphibian.' "
Lathyrus tuberoses, L., and other Essex Plants.—In connection with
the note in this volume of the Essex Naturalist (ante page 170), respecting
the occurrence of L. tuberoses in Sussex, it may be interesting to quote from
Mr. Thomas Corder's original record of the plant in Essex, which will be found
in the "Zoologist" for 1860, page 7165. Mr. Corder wrote :—"* * * * * The
parish of Fyfield is several miles in extent, and the soil is a very strong heavy
clay, with a sub-soil of calcareous marl. The plant in question is found abundantly
in almost every cornfield and hedge-row in the parish, and also in the adjoining
one of Willingale Spain, and probably in High Ongar. In some places it is so
abundant as to damage the corn, and it has grown in the same fields for the last
sixty years at least, according to the testimony of old men living at Fyfield, so
that no doubt can exist as to its being a truly wild plant. I suggest that it may
be called the 'Fyfield Pea.' Norton Mandeville, where Bupleurum falcatum
was discovered by me many years since, is in close proximity to Fyfield, and I have
since found that plant in a new locality, at Writtle, four miles from Chelmsford.
I may mention that the very rare Lathyrus hirsutus is found at Nazing, Essex,
in a field near the church, growing with L. sylvestris, L. aphaca, and L. nissolia,
and also the scarcely less rare Vicia bithynica, all in the space of a few yards."