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Baby otter squeals and his family comes running
Six weeks old and cut off from his family, an otter pup in Singapore spends nearly a week in human care. Then his helpers set him down on a beach to call for his own. more
The trouble starts at a marina. The pup gets separated from his family at their holt, the den where otters sleep, and falls into a canal, which at six weeks old is more water than he can handle. A retiree named Patrick Ng happens to be nearby and lifts him out.
The first hope is that the family will come back for him, so he's set down at the holt and watched. The OtterWatch group waits ten hours. No otters return, and a pup that small cannot wait much longer, so he goes to Wildlife Reserves Singapore. His name is ZooToby.
He arrives hungry. The keepers feed him milk and he drinks every drop they give him. Over the next few days he gets regular feeds, a vitamin B shot and a dose of dewormer, until the gray scrap of fuzz that came out of a canal looks strong enough to try going home.
Going home takes planning. Nearly a week after the rescue, Sivasothi N. of NUS, known as the Otterman, leads a team drawn from the Otter Working Group, the National Parks Board, Wildlife Reserves Singapore, OtterWatch and wildlife fans. Watchers spread out along the coast, and it takes many tries to find a spot where the adults would be sure to notice a pup.
The chance comes at a beach, not a pretty one, with plastic bottles and litter across the sand, and nearly everyone who watches says so. But the marina family is there. The team sets the pup down and leaves him there, and he does what a pup does, which is squeal. The adults hear him and come at a run, and in a moment he is in the middle of them.
SaveThen the family is off again, taking their smallest member with them, and the pup is home. One viewer says they never cheered that hard watching football. Another figures the pup now has a story to tell for the rest of his life, and a week like that one earns it.
