I've enjoyed a number of interesting wildlife encounters while fishing. Once while fishing the canals of Miami along the endge of the Everglades, I was creeping along keeping one eye on the water for looking for bass and the other on the path watching for water moccasins. It was a somewhat spontaneous fishing trip and I was wearing flip flops so I wanted to be careful. As I crept along, all of a sudden, grass and dirt was flying immediately to my right and I froze as a six foot alligator tore across the tops of my feet as he made his mad dash for the water. I had been so quiet, that I didn’t wake him up until I was between him and the canal. I’m still not sure who was more startled by the encounter.

More recently, last week in fact, I was out in my kayak fishing the 50 acre lake I live on. We always have a couple of pairs of beavers and too many muskrats so I see them quite often. I heard a splash over by a nearby dock so I stopped to look what it was. Up popped an otter about 10 feet from my kayak. He stopped and a sat up straight in the water up to get a good look at me. Then, he swam about 30 feet away and started squeaking/whistling looking back where he had come from. Sure enough, up pops his mate. She was even more interested in me and swam very close to the kayak and stopped, watching me. The male (I assumed) then made a short cough or barking noise and she dove under to swim away. I’ve only seen otters one other time in this lake when I saw a female and three pups. The pups were about 2 feet long and she was taking them up the bank along the dam presumably to go down to the South River which is only about 50 yards away. The last pup was dragging a 12 inch bass along which was quite a feat for such a little guy. He was determined to keep his fish and him mom and siblings waited for him on top of the dam where he settled down for lunch.

Jim Smith