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Eurasian otters are enjoying a fragile revival in the British Isles. For decades industrial pollutants – insecticides, fungicides, organochlorides, and DDT – leached into rivers there, and by the late 1970s the British otter population had all but collapsed. The mammals also went extinct in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, and in most of France, Germany, and Italy as well. But as chemical bans slowly took effect, writes Adam Nicolson in the February issue of National Geographic magazine, “the population started to climb back toward health”. By 2010 nearly 60 percent of English riverbanks were occupied by otters. Today “only the London area and some northern industrial cities remain otter-free”. (Photo by Charlie Hamilton James/National Geographic)
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