In Search of Sea Otters
Notes from the Coastal Guardian Watchmen Conference
Just off the front of our boat a humpback whale slid over, its long back gliding over and slowly down underwater. At the same time, a small pod of killer whales passed by the side of our boat, a baby whale in their midst, its stubby dorsal fin dwarfed by the tall black fins of its family. Normally I drop everything when whales are around. There’s nothing like being in the presence of whales to collectively silence a group of people, to bring everyone together with joyful smiles, to inspire a sense of awe and wonder.
But this day I turned my back on the whales and eagerly kept my gaze focused along the shoreline. We were bouncing around in big swells just offshore, and in the white foam where the waves crashed against the granite coastline there were sea otters. Or so I had been told.
This was a work trip, a field trip during the annual conference of the Coastal Guardian Watchmen Network, but I was on a personal mission to find sea otters. The First Nations I work with on the Central Coast laughed at me a little – they see otters all the time and don’t know why they are such a big deal. Some have told me they’ve seen rafts of over 100 sea otters! But for me, I grew up on this coast knowing that sea otters had been hunted until there were none left in BC waters. Not a single one. I grew up knowing that they had been reintroduced in a couple of places along the coast, but it is only now, decades later, that they are becoming more common. And I had yet to see one…
I was on the coast to organize and facilitate a conference of the Coastal Guardian Watchmen Network, in partnership with the Coastal First Nations Great Bear Initiative. Over 40 participants came from First Nations of the Central and North Coast and Haida Gwaii to talk about their work, share experiences, network and strategize with each other on issues of concern. Guardian Watchmen are the eyes and ears of their territories, monitoring the health of ecosystems, watching over important cultural sites and keeping an eye on resource use.
One of the projects of the Coastal Guardian Watchmen Network over the past year, something that has been keeping me busy, is the development of a Guardian Watchmen Regional Monitoring Strategy. The idea of the Regional Monitoring Strategy is that if each Nation gathers data in a consistent manner, the data can be pooled to provide a coast-wide picture on issues of concern that can be used in planning and decision-making. Over the past year we have embarked on a process to distill down the priority issues and come up with methodologies for collecting information that will work for the various communities. All this culminated in the launch of the Regional Monitoring Strategy at the annual conference, complete with field cards and an online data management system.
Which is why we were in a boat bouncing around in the waves and I was looking for sea otters. We were on a field trip to try out the new field cards, and one of the priorities for Guardian Watchmen is to monitor the presence (or absence) of wildlife. As they put it, if you can write down everything that is there now, then you will know in the future what has been lost if something like an oil spill happens.
So around me the folks on the boat were writing down the whale sightings – species, distance, direction of travel, confidence level, condition (healthy, poor, dead), and so on. And I was hoping to write down a sea otter sighting…
Finally, there they were. About 3 heads bobbing around in the waves just off shore. I was hoping for the image from posters of my childhood of an otter lying on its back using a rock to smash open a sea urchin or a crab. Maybe we needed less wind and calmer water to see all that. For now, I am content with just having seen their heads, and with my new knowledge that sea otters are much, much larger than I had anticipated. It is enough to know that they are out there and doing well.
