Erin McDaid of Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust writes about the return of otters to the Trent

In recent years, there has been an increased public focus on the state of our rivers, and rightly so. — writes Erin McDaid of Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust.

Rivers are a vital part of our landscape and there is no question that more can be done to clean them but alongside our shared aspirations for rivers to be cleaner it is worth reflecting on just how far we’ve come.

As recently as the 1970s, , our own great River, the Trent, was labelled as the second most polluted river in Europe behind the mighty Rhine.

A report in Hansard of a Parliamentary debate referencing the state of the Trent refers to the fact that while water quality improvements since the 1960s had resulted in fish returning to the river below Burton on Trent, the river at Burton was still devoid of life.

Against the backdrop of centuries of pollution following the Industrial Revolution and burgeoning growth of urban centres, it is worth celebrating the fact that while there is undoubtedly room for improvement – things have come a long way.

Given that the Parliamentary discussion included references to sections of the river being unable to support fish, it is no wonder that otters, who’s diet is made up of between 70-95 fish a day, became extinct on the Trent and across much of England by the end of the 70’s – only to return two decades later following continued pressure for improvements in water quality, massive reductions in toxic industrial waste and investment in sewage treatment.

In my early years at Nottinghamshire Wildlife Trust, reports of otters anywhere in the county were treated with suspicion.

In the late 1990s, my wife reported seeing an otter feeding at Attenborough Nature Reserve – having watched it from the train as she travelled to London – but this report was dismissed out of hand. Shortly afterwards, The Wildlife Trusts and Water companies from across the UK announced a joint initiative, alongside the Environment Agency to deliver targeted action to encourage otters back to their old haunts – with further major investment in sewage treatment and the creation of suitable habitat for these elusive mammals.

At the time, I’m sure that some felt that the prospects of otters recolonising the Nottinghamshire Trent were hopeful at best and even preposterous – and our efforts to create artificial ‘holts’ for them to rest up and breed were somewhat performative but our team soon began to find evidence of otters – in the form feeding stashes and their distinctive droppings, known as spraints.

There were reports from time to time, but confirmed sightings remained something of a Holy Grail and it was more than a decade before an otter was captured on camera at Attenborough back in 2010.

Photographs of otters at the reserve were considered ‘rare’ as recently as 2023, but increased frequency of sightings over the past couple of years mean that visitors willing to make an early start and showing great patience have a realistic chance.

My only personal experience with an otter took place on the Kintyre Peninsula on the west coast of Scotland where a walk along a pristine secluded beach with views across to the Isle of Gigha resulted in an unforgettable close-up view.

In a weird quirk of fate, my life-long football team, Nottingham Forest, adopted Paul McCartney’s hit – Mull of Kintyre – in 1977, while the club was flying high, but just as otters were teetering on the brink.

Down the years I’ve sung along to the Forest version of the song, which refers to ‘mist rolling in from the Trent’ and a desire to ‘always to be here’ at the City Ground on the banks of the Trent.

However, who could have imagined that almost 50 years later, that I, alongside thousands of Forest fans would be belting out the song just as the latest batch of images of otter at Attenborough landed on the Attenborough Nature Reserve Appreciation Group’s Facebook page.

While still hugely exciting, it says something about the progress that has been made with river quality on the Trent that sightings of otter are now longer considered ‘news’ and that record catches of barbel and other species that thrive in clear water mean that the Trent is once again being described as England’s greatest course fishing river.

To paraphrase Forest’s version of McCartney’s classic my desire is for otters always to be here on the banks of the Trent and I suspect that my next encounter with one of these amazing mammals is much more likely to be somewhere close to the banks of the River Trent than it is to be 400 miles away just off the road to the Mull of Kintyre.