“Otter” picture 2

I thought I was mostly going to post bird pictures, but the BRT is full of wildlife of all types. This is the second of three pictures I took Sunday of the mammal swimming in the Bosque River. When I first saw it I thought it was an otter. It did not swim like a nutria or a beaver. I watched it for about a minute. It appeared and disappeared several times. The last time it came to the surface it looked like it had something (fish ?) in its mouth. I took a third picture of this but it’s very blurry.

I’m not a biologist. So, my identification of this animal could be wrong. However, if you look at the fuzzy picture on the left side of this page you will see a classic profile of an otter’s head sticking out of the water. A closer examination of the head shows whiskers.

Otters were supposedly hunted and trapped to extinction in most of Texas by the late 1800s. But according to what I have read river otters are making a comeback in Texas. There are recent reports of river otters in the San Marcos River near San Antonio. So, there is no reason to think river otters shouldn’t at some point make their way up the Bosque River to Stephenville. I think they ,or at least one, are already here.