By Elisabeth Gish | Grants Manager/Community Conservation Advisor
It has been a while since we featured Angkor’s smooth-coated otters in our donor update and now we have some exciting news to share. Late last year, when the released otters came for supplemental fish our Angkor staff noticed that the female was looking round and her nipples plump. On January 23 the otters were first seen with 5 new pups!
As you may remember from previous reports, of the original family brought from Phnom Tamao Wildlife Rescue Centre in November 2019 only the founding female otter remains in Angkor. After their release, the family traveled widely and sometimes did not return for the supplemental fish we provide, for a few days in a row, indicating that they were catching fish and had the skills to survive in the wild. However, the Angkor Archeological Park is not an entirely wild landscape and the female’s original partner and offspring disappeared one by one between 2020 and early 2022. On a few occasions our otters were found in fishing nets and traps, placed in the lakes and waterways of Angkor. Otters may drown if caught in a submerged net or fishermen may kill them if they find them in their traps. We believe this is what befell the missing otters and wrote a letter of explanation to the Director of APSARA, the managing government authority, in the hope that he could put an end to the fishing in Angkor.
To boost the otter population in Angkor, in November 2021 we transferred two young male smooth-coated otters that had been born at Phnom Tamao. Initially the new otters were housed in a small cage built inside the otter enclosure to acclimatize and introduce them to the already released otters. In March 2022, we released the two young males into the main enclosure and within two days they had escaped into the surrounding forest with the founding female otter. One of these males is the father of the new pups.
The family often sleeps in the hole under the small cage inside the enclosure. As the pups have grown, the group has started traveling further away again and occasionally the otters do not come to feed. One pup was smaller than the others, but seemed fine through February. In late March, this smallest pup wasn’t seen for 3 days and it was not in the hole when the keepers’ checked. Recently, only 4 pups have been spotted with the adults and we believe the smallest one may have died. It is difficult to get good photographs of otters as they are seldom still for long, but the keepers’ recently captured this short video of the 3 adults and 1 pup rolling on the forest floor.
Overall, our project to reintroduce native wildlife species back into Angkor is progressing well. The released pileated gibbons and their offspring are fine. The wreathed and great hornbills released in December 2021 are still around – in mid-March APSARA workers reported seeing a few perched together in a big tree in front of the Angkor Wat temple. We have also released a total of 9 green peafowl thus far, and one of the females is now sitting on a clutch of 5 eggs in the APSARA tree nursery. Hopefully we will have some peacock chicks to report on next time!
Loyal supporters like you who share our long-term vision of restoring natural heritage in the heart of Cambodia’s most important cultural heritage site is what makes this exciting project possible. Thank you so much!
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