Sea otters' revival in state waters brings new concerns
CAPE ALAVA, Clallam County -- It's a three-mile hike to this rugged headland on the Washington coast, and Mark Stafford starts scanning for sea otters as soon as he emerges from the rainforest to an ocean overlook.
With eyes sharpened by a decade of field experience, he can tell it's going to be a good day.
"There's two resting groups over there," he says, pointing at distant mats of kelp undulating in the swell.
To the unschooled observer, nothing in the water remotely resembles a furry mammal.
"They look like little logs," Stafford prompts, attaching his spotting scope to a tripod and zooming in on a slumbering male floating belly-up, chin resting on its chest.
Then Stafford, too, settles into a comfortable perch for his day's work: quantifying the remarkable rebirth of a species eradicated by fur traders a century ago.
The summer sea-otter count is an annual ritual for Stafford and a dozen other biologists; this year, they tallied about 700 animals from Destruction Island, near the Hoh river, to the western end of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The first census, in 1977, found 19 animals.
While most people welcome the otters' return, they already have become a nuisance to others.
Voracious eaters, the otters decimated sea urchins in Neah Bay, wiping out a lucrative fishery. A large group of animals then headed down the strait toward Port Angeles, picking the rocky reefs clean and forcing the state to cut back quotas for sea-urchin fishermen.
Wildlife managers expect those kinds of conflicts to increase as otters expand their range, possibly into the rich crab habitat around the San Juan Islands or the popular razor-clam beds near Grays Harbor.
"It's probably just a matter of time," said Michael Ulrich, a shellfish biologist for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Later this summer, the agency will release a long-awaited recovery plan that recommends otters remain on the state endangered species list until their numbers more than double. The plan also will detail some of the clashes that are likely to develop between otters and people, and lay the groundwork for dealing with them.
The goal is to protect the otters and avoid the type of debate under way in California, where wildlife managers tried to herd otters away from prime shellfish grounds but failed, angering fishermen. Now, otter populations there are crashing for unknown reasons, while lawmakers, biologists and fishermen argue over what to do.
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Sea otters' revival in state waters brings new concerns