Charlie the baby otter rescued from the brink
A BABY otter which had lost its mother and was not expected to make it through the night was rescued at the weekend by Hillswick Wildlife Sanctuary.
Sanctuary owners Jan and Pete Bevington were called on Saturday by Elizabeth Christie, a social care worker from Laxo, who found the creature crying on the roadside at Billister in North Nesting.
The young otter was frantically running around before hiding under Elizabeth’s car to take refuge from the elements.
“I parked at the pier there and I heard this noise but I didn’t have time to investigate. I went away and did other work but when I came back again at lunchtime I could still hear that noise,” she said.
“So I went on to the grass and I could see a little otter, and it was crying. I phoned Pete at the Hillswick Wildlife Sanctuary.
“But then the little otter was hiding under my car so I couldn’t really leave without running over him. So I picked it up and took it to the next house, got a box and we took it into the porch.”
Living close to the sea, Elizabeth said she regularly comes across otters but has never seen one so small.
The wee creature was dehydrated and hypothermia was setting in when the Bevingtons picked him up soon afterwards.
“We took him straight back to the sanctuary, warmed him up with a hot water bottle and a blanket and eventually managed to get him to suck some milk,” Jan Bevington said.
“It was obvious that he had started to shut down and certainly would not have lasted the night with the weather in Shetland.”
The otter, now dubbed Charlie, was fed and enjoyed a long sleep before the Bevingtons were up at 3am to feed him again.
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The sanctuary staff said by late morning on Sunday the otter was more sprightly, but as he is only a few weeks old he will not be able to eat solid foods yet.
While they cautioned that he was not “out of the woods yet”, the couple said they are optimistic about Charlie’s progress.
There is a video of Charlie on the Hillswick Wildlife Sanctuary’s Facebook page at https://www.facebook.com/HillswickWildlifeSanctuary/?fref=ts
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