'Opening up a treasure chest': Wildlife technician finds baby otters on Richmond job
A Richmond family had some unlikely — and adorable — guests: baby otters.
Alex Ritz, the owner and operator of Skedaddle Vancouver, a pest removal and exclusion service, said they received a call from the family, informing them there was an otter roaming on their property that had dug a hole underneath the shed in their backyard.
It wasn’t an unusual place to find an otter because the house was just a few blocks from the shoreline, with a drainage ditch running up the street that is a “kind of hidey area for them to use as a bit of a wildlife highway, said Ritz.
But usually they’re a rare find, since otters are aquatic animals and prefer natural areas, unlike skunks or raccoons, making this an exciting job. It’s especially rare to work with otter babies, and Ritz thinks this was the first time Skedaddle had done so.
Skedaddle Humane Wildlife Control
“This was a very unique experience for us and for me,” he said.
However, otter baby season is in the spring, so Ritz said he did a full baby search when they went to the property to complete their exclusion procedure, which is creating a barrier around the shed so wildlife can’t get underneath anymore.
He also wanted to make sure the mother otter wasn’t there when he started, for both his own safety and so that he wouldn’t cause her unnecessary stress.
Ritz started by stomping around the floor of the shed to see if he could get the mother to make some noise. He didn’t hear anything, so he took his phone, stuck it inside the hole she had dug, and took some photos with the flash on to see what was inside.
“I still didn’t see a nest, I didn’t see the babies, just the hole that she had dug to get underneath the shed,” he said.
He started the exclusion procedure, digging a hole around its perimeter and installing a wildlife-proof metal screen.
As Ritz was doing this work, he said he continued to keep his eye out for babies, but didn’t find anything.
“At this point, I was thinking there weren’t going to be any babies, but just to be safe, I did a search at the opposite side of the shed,” he said.
He noticed that it was a little bit more damp on the floorboards of the shed underneath. He stuck his phone in and took a photo, and saw some nesting material, which was long grasses.
“So I grabbed that, pulled it out, and as I’m pulling it out, I saw the baby otters,” he said. “It’s like opening up a treasure chest and finding treasure when you see the babies for the first time. And then just seeing them being so cute is fun,” he said.
Skedaddle Humane Wildlife Control/Submitted
“It’s kind of like holding baby puppies.”
Ritz guessed that the three babies were under three weeks old, because their eyes weren’t open yet. He got the baby otters out from underneath the shed and put them in a heated ‘baby reunion box’ alongside the nesting materials.
They left the babies in the box outside the shed.
“When mom comes back to come home, she realizes she can’t get back inside, she sees her babies right at the entrance of where she was digging in before, and then she can grab them and take them away to somewhere else,” Ritz said.