Hillswick Wildlife Sanctuary

Peerie Mary – a Christmas gift

On Boxing Day 2007 we were brought a young male otter cub we called Wolfie. On Christmas Eve 2008 Kirikou arrived, a young female cub who had lost the use of her back legs. Whaddaya know? Christmas Day morning 2009 we received a call from Ian and Carol Johnson, of Cullivoe, who had found a cub lying at death’s door in their back garden after being abandoned by her mother – not an unusual occurrence in the otter world when there is more than one cub to feed.

The Johnsons had missed the only ferry of the day, so we gave them some advice on looking after her and the next morning we met them at the Toft ferry terminal. When we told them it was a female they named her Mary (if she’d been a male he would have been Joseph, they said).

Her gentle nature was disconcerting. We thought it might have been partly due to the trauma she had been through, and it was a full 10 days before we were confident that she wanted to stay with us. Otters in captivity can sometimes just shut down from stress and die.

She was quite a big cub, big enough to be three or four months old, but acted as if she was younger. She showed no interest in eating fish whatsoever and was completely non-aggressive. We could handle her without gloves, which is unheard of even with baby otters who have very sharp teeth and like to use them. We called in local otter expert John Campbell for an opinion, who suggested she was probably just two months old when she arrived. If Carol and Ian had not acted so quickly she would not have survived. At that age she should not have been out of the holt, especially in the freezing snow.
Click on the thumbnails below to see larger images of Peerie Mary.

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