ANANTNAG, (Kashmir): A local boy Nasir Amin Bhat, 17, was barely ankle-deep in the water in Hugam village Anantnag district of Jammu and Kashmir, when his school friend and neighbour Adil Ahmad shouted from the riverbank on a breezy summer evening in May.
“Turn back! There’s something in the water”, Adil shouted after seeing some unkown creature in the waters.
Across the Lidder, a tributary of the Jhelum River, in Hugam village a Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) plunged into the glacial waters and started paddling furiously against the current with all four limbs.
“I had no idea what it was,” Bhat, a high school student, told Al Jazeera, “but I grabbed my smartphone and turned on the camera.”
The grainy, nine-second video shows the creature with a fur coat – classified as “near threatened” on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List – gliding out of the water and jumping onto the riverbank.
After a few clumsy steps, the semiaquatic animal, which can reach elevations of 3,660 metres (12,000 feet) in the Himalayas during the summer, disappears behind a thick grove of bushes, bringing the video to an uneventful end.
Eurasian otters used to thrive along the banks of the Lidder River, but rampant construction forced the semiaquatic animal to retreat
Long believed to have gone extinct, Eurasian otters seem to be showing signs of resurgence in Kashmir, with three individuals spotted by Indian wildlife officers in two places since 2023.
The chance sightings have excited environmentalists and wildlife conservationists while raising hopes of a better future for the Himalayan region’s fragile freshwater ecosystems, which have been battered by climate change in recent years.
Indian wildlife biologist Nisarg Prakash believes the sighting of otters in Kashmir was an indicator of high-quality aquatic habitats.
“The reappearance of otters might mean that poaching has come down or the habitat has improved, and maybe both in some cases,” Prakash, whose work focuses on otters in southern parts of India, told Al Jazeera.
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