Diving into Karanambu to meet the Otters

So my blog has quickly (Im having trouble typing what Im thinking as the Lion King song ‘I Just Cant Wait To Be King’ is playing on Anas laptop and so of course Im singing along, which usually leads me to type what Im singing P: haha) run away from me. The days just disappear into one another very quickly.

Lets see…after flying out t the ranch in a Iittle 12 seater (including pilot and copilot) I arrived on Saturday afternoon and straight away jumped right into helping feed the kids! Was pretty hectic at first. Seeing as giant otters are highly social highly vocal creatures they make a whole lotta noise….at a very high pitch (especially when wanting food…which is all the time).



First things first I guess I should introduce the otters themselves. For background stories check out Dr Lucy Spelmans blog (link is on my first post).
Buddy is just over 18mths old and in July Karanambu (KR) will have had him for two years. He is about 5ft and we guesstimate maybe 25-30kg but we aren’t sure because weighing at this age and size is an undertaking we are not so sure about. After a suspicious ‘accident’ he is now either almost totally blind or completely so, we think completely so but cannot be 100% certain. He seems to manage very well without his sight, his sense of smell, hearing and touch is amazing. Giant Otters faces are covered in whiskers which help him sense a lot. He is still able to catch fish when we take him down to the river. Buddy is very well behaved (most of the time) and is great to play with in the water. You can offer him/he will find and ‘take’ your index finger in his mouth behind his canines, in front of the molars in the space there which allows you to drag him (without getting bitten)around, up, down and all through the water which he seems to love – it is also an excessively cool experience for me! Walking him to and from the river he often follows right at my or whoever is leading heels, his nose is glued to them as such, helps him not bump into stuff I guess.
Currently Buddy gets fed twice a day: 930am & 330pm, both times he gets taken down to the river with two people for a few hours, usually about 2 to 2.5hrs.


(close up coming soon, just wanted to give an idea of his size)

Next come to two ‘kids’.
Bel is one of the otters seen in the picture of my first post, there she is with her brother. Unfortunately he died around Christmas time from what they think was pneumonia after breathing in milk. Such a shame but it happens. Bel is a tiny little otter that is growing but very slowly and who has an almost constant potbelly from all the fish she gorges on! When it comes to feeding time she is so sweet and polite, when she has finished a piece of fish she just looks at you waiting, and then if you start taking too long she looks at you, then the water (we feed them in the water in the hopes of teaching them that food/fish comes from water…) then back at you with her big bulging eyes. If I remember correctly she is about 2mths old at the moment.


Please forgive the slightly unattractive picture of Bel haha but I dont actually have many pictures of the kids yet. Even though I see them generally 3-4 times a day, the visits are hectic and busy!

Philip on the other hand is a delinquent. He arrived between Christmas and new years and although he is only perhaps half a month older than Bel he is much bigger…and louder. He has become much more polite during feeds, perhaps only screaming once if I take too long with the next piece of fish. He gets fed in the concrete ‘pool’ at the back of the enclosure whereas Bel gets fed near the front gate in a tub. He will kamikaze himself off the low wall, splat on the concrete and then dash for the fish. He is very lazy when it comes to finding pieces, if it is 3inches thataway he gives up on it and comes back screaming as if to say ‘I couldn’t find it, you didn’t throw any did you?!’. However over the last few days he has become a little terrorist when the food is done. The best way to tell the kids the food is all gone is to show both open, empty hands. Oh they’ll still scream, loud and long but eventually they get the message. Philip however has taken rather a liking to toes…and biting said toes. We all wear thongs here (havaianas – their rubber withstands the rocks much better than any others) because it is too hot to wear anything else. This puts our poor toes at risk, we have started giving him a wack on the nose and a loud NO! each time he bites to try and deter him…time will tell.


Terrorist!

Now the kids get fed four times a day: 830am, 1130am – this is when it’s their turn at the river (except we take them to a different landing that is more like a little lagoon so they cannot swim off too far and don’t have to worry about current), 230pm and 530pm. Diane, Dr Lucy and Stefi were all worried that Bel was not getting enough food or growing enough so the 4th feeding session was introduced only a day or two after I arrived. Now it becomes easier to see how these days disappear doesn’t it!
Typical otter food:


I shall endeavor to get a pic of a whole piranha next time ;)
There is a huge, and I mean Huge Piranha head out near the otter house that got left behind, it is now pretty much the dried out skull with a bit of skin on it. I will post a photo. Its teeth are massive, shaped like some sharks with two small peaks on either side of a large peak. Awesome.

Piranha, especially the Red-Bellied kind are their favourite.

Ok so this post is huge enough I shall make another to introduce the main people here and the actual place itself.