Nasir Amin Bhat, 17, was just barely ankle-deep in the water when his friend Adil Ahmad, a neighbor from his school, shouted from the riverbank on a cool May evening.
“Turn back!” Something is in the water, exactly.
A Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) plunged into the glacial waters in Hugam village in the Indian-administered Kashmir’s Anantnag district and paddled furiously against the current with all four limbs across the Lidder, a tributary of the Jhelum River.
I turned on the camera on my smartphone, but I had no idea what it was,” said Bhat, a student in high school.
The fur-clad creature, which is “near threatened” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List, is pictured gliding out of the water and jumping onto the riverbank in the nine-second video.
The semiaquatic animal, which can reach 3, 660 metres (12, 000 feet) in the Himalayas during the summer, disappears behind a dense grove of bushes, bringing the video to an uneventful conclusion.
Eurasian otters have been spotted twice in Kashmir since 2023, with three of them identified by Indian wildlife officers as extinct, and they are now resembling to be extinct.
Environmentalists and conservationists are hopeful that the Himalayan region’s fragile freshwater ecosystems, which have been impacted by climate change in recent years, will recover from their initial excitement after seeing the chance sightings.
Habitat has improved, according to the statement.
Otters were spotted in Kashmir, according to Indian wildlife biologist Nisarg Prakash, as an indication of high-quality aquatic habitats.
According to Prakash, whose research focuses on otters in southern India, “the reappearance of otters might mean that poaching has decreased or the habitat has improved, or perhaps both,” he said.
Otters were once common in northern India, including the Himalayan foothills, the Gangetic plains, and some parts of the northeast, protected by the Indian Wildlife Protection Act.
The Eurasian otter, known as “voddur,” was discovered in water bodies in the Lidder and Jehlum valleys, including Wular Lake, one of Asia’s largest freshwater lakes, in a peer-reviewed study conducted by IUCN in November of last year.
However, their population has gotten “patchy and fragmented” over time as a result of “habitat loss, pollution, and human disturbances,” according to Khursheed Ahmad, a senior wildlife scientist at the Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology (SKUAST-K).
Eurasian otters retreated and were restricted to areas that were least accessible to humans because of habitat changes caused by human activities and the encroachment of their ideal habitats along riverbanks and other water bodies.
Although they were not extinct, SKUAST-K’s Division of Wildlife Sciences, Ahmad, said, “Sightings and occurrences had become extremely rare and never were documented.
A research team led by Ahmad unintentionally stumbled upon otters in Gurez, a valley of lush meadows and towering peaks split into two by the Kishanganga River, the de facto Himalayan border between India and Pakistan, during a study on musk deer.
Two individual otters were found in a valley near the 330MW Kishanganga Hydro Electric Project, which was constructed by India after a protracted legal battle with Pakistan at the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, on August 6, 2023, at an elevation of 2,600 metres (8,530 feet).
The research team concentrated on keeping track of otters’ presence on Kashmir’s Indian side following that sighting.
No additional presence was unfortunately not documented due to the significant disturbances caused by fishing and other local and paramilitary activities, according to the IUCN study.
Ahmed claimed that Bhat’s video is only Kashmir’s second instance of photographic evidence of otters.
Too afraid to go there
Residents of the large farming community of Hugam, which has around 300 families, are both excited and worried.
Muneera Bano, a homemaker, wakes up to the crows chirping furiously on the willow trees lining the tributary’s banks outside her 58-mile (36-mile) south of Srinagar’s main city, to the sound of dawn.
After the discovery of the otter, Bano had been doing this for years, so she has stopped washing clothes and utensils on the riverbank.
It is hiding in one of the underwater caves in the tributary, which there are. Crows see it when it first appears in the morning and scream. She said, “I’m too terrified to go there.”
The teenager who made the video, Bhat, claimed that he frequently took a dip in the tributary’s icy waters and occasionally caught fish. He said, “I can’t even think about going there right now.”
Indian wildlife officials set up a camera trap to confirm that it was an Eurasian otter, which was also visible in Bhat’s video, and not a crocodile, as a result of the grainy video’s conundrums about the presence of crocodiles in the tributary.
Some wildlife officials took a bath in the river while village elders were present, demonstrating that the water was completely safe.
Otters are unpredictable, especially when they are close to humans, even though they are not a threat to them. However, according to scientists, these animals can become used to being around humans.
Wildlife biologist Prakash said curiosity about otters can make them a sight to behold while watching them fish or swim rather than be afraid or afraid.
“Otters are primarily active at dawn, dusk, and after dark, but they can occasionally be seen at night.” He claimed that the majority of Asian otters eat fish, eels, and occasionally waterfowl.
Wasim Ahmad, a farmer in Kashmir, recalls a summer day in the early 1990s when he was returning from school along the banks of the Jhelum River, a significant tributary of the Jhelum River.
As Ahmad, who is now in his 40s, turned the corner and saw a large crowd of people cheering along. One man was walking a dog on a leash while another was pursuing a dead otter.
A group of poachers who, in the past, sold the skins of animals like cats, otters, and other animals to survive in Bagh-e-Mehtab in Srinagar. The community has abandoned the previous profession as more stringent animal welfare laws are now in effect in India.
Our elders had warned us that otters would cut off the children and eat them raw, Ahmad, who was in the ninth grade at the time, said. However, as I got older, I never saw even one person who had an otter bite. In essence, it was a plan to divert the children’s attention away from the river.
The otters’ return to Kashmir was a positive sign, according to Ahmad, the wildlife scientist.
“We should now make sure that the new habitat is protected from unchecked pollution, garbage accumulation, increased carbon emissions, and habitat degradation.” He told Al Jazeera, “These challenges are crucial for their conservation and wellbeing. “Addressing these challenges is.
Source: Aljazeera
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