Trappers help put otters on road to recovery in South Dakota
by Dana Hess

            On any given day, extension trapper Brian Baumgartner will handle a variety of calls for service. The Game, Fish and Parks Department trapper based in Sioux Falls may answer a complaint about coyotes harassing livestock or beavers chomping away on newly planted trees or a raccoon that thought it was a good idea to set up housekeeping in someone’s lake cottage.
            The call he answered in late January was different. A landowner south of Brookings complained that something was preying on the baitfish, bass and young walleyes in his ponds. He suspected it was a river otter.
            While this was bad news for the landowner, it was good news for anyone who cares about the viability of this threatened species. Otters are a state protected species in South Dakota. If there are enough of them to start causing problems for landowners, that says something positive about the robust nature of the state’s current population.
            Otters were once plentiful in South Dakota. Here, like in other states, they faced the triple threat of habitat loss, urban development and extensive trapping. Highly prized for their fur, otters were targeted by trappers in many states. And in many states the result of unregulated trapping was the devastation of the otter population.
            Otters are on the rebound in South Dakota for a couple of reasons. In 1998 and 2000, the Flandreau Santee Sioux Tribe imported 34 otters from Louisiana. GFP department personnel report that those otters are reproducing in their new environment. In the past couple of years GFP has handled calls in the northeast part of the state regarding otters that are coming in from Minnesota.
            This turn of events is good news for South Dakota and the same results are being played out in other states where otters were once endangered. That turnaround started, oddly enough, with a trapper.
            Lee Roy Sevin, a Louisiana trapper, was a man in the right place at the right time. In the late 1950s Sevin started the Bayou Otter Farm near Theriot, La. Sevin studied the lively furbearers, figuring out how to get them to flourish in captivity. Soon zoos all over the world were asking for Sevin’s otters since they were noted for having a low mortality rate and for thriving in their new surroundings.
            About that same time, state game and fish departments and conservation groups began to take an interest in restocking otters and many of them turned to Sevin. It’s ironic that while trappers had devastated otter numbers in many states, Sevin in turn used trappers extensively to provide him with healthy, live otters.
            One challenge Sevin faced was providing enough food for the voracious otters. Otters generally dine on fish but Sevin couldn’t get enough fish to feed the otters on his farm. During his days as a trapper, Sevin had observed otters ganging up to kill nutria, a South American rodent inadvertently released in Louisiana. The nutria thrived in Louisiana and so did the trappers who went after their pelts.
            Sevin’s discovery that otters would eat nutria created boom times for trappers in southern Louisiana. They could earn twice with the nutria, selling the fur to a dealer and the carcass to Sevin. At Sevin’s farm they also had a steady market for all the live otters they could bring in.
            Tom Krause, editor of The American Trapper, the official publication of the National Trappers’ Association, says that Sevin had a unique system for dealing with trappers. If Sevin bought an otter from a trapper and it subsequently died, Sevin would put that trapper on his own version of probation. If the trapper supplied another otter that died, he was done doing business with Sevin. “Since Lee Roy was the only live otter market,” Krause said, “there was a real incentive on the part of trappers to use the right traps, handle the animals softly and according to directions.”
            Sevin’s directions included using only foothold traps to capture the otters. Those traps (the No. 11 longspring trap for those of you keeping score at home) helped the otters avoid injury.
            At 71, Sevin retired his otter farm in 1999. According to Krause, Sevin’s farm delivered more than 2,400 of the nearly 4,000 otters that were used for reintroduction and restocking efforts in 18 states. “Virtually all of his submissions were taken from the bayou country in southern Louisiana in foothold traps by fur trappers,” Krause said.
            Trapping as a way to help any species is a story that needs to be told more often according to Art Smith, the administrator of GFP’s wildlife damage management program. Smith manages a cadre of extension trappers across South Dakota. “Trapping is usually seen as a way to take animals,” Smith said, “both by private citizens and the department. Yet those river otters were captured in foothold traps. There’s obviously a way to use trapping in the management of animals without hurting them.”
            It should be noted that trappers in South Dakota are playing another role in the study and re-establishment of otters.
           Last year alone there were reports of as many as 12 otters inadvertently caught in beaver traps in Roberts, Day, Codington, Hamlin and Grant counties. Like many states where otters have been reintroduced or reappeared, South Dakota finds itself with the problem of a threatened species showing up in traps set for other animals.
           In South Dakota, an otter found dead in a trap must be left undisturbed in the trap and reported to a GFP conservation officer or trapper within 12 hours. Biologists can learn quite a bit from those otters. A DNA sample taken from an accidentally trapped otter offers information about the animal’s origins. Otters from Louisiana and Minnesota have distinctly different DNA markers.
           GFP biologists would also like reports on otters inadvertently trapped and released alive. Those reports can be e-mailed to wildinfo@state.sd.us or phoned in to GFP Terrestrial Ecologist Silka Kempema at (605) 773-2742. Trapping information, as well as population surveys, helps improve biologists’ understanding of the overall status of river otters in South Dakota.
           According to Kempema, reports from trappers and sightings by members of the public are recorded in the Natural Heritage Database. “This is the best, although incomplete, information we have on otters,” she said. Concerns about incidental catches of otters in beaver traps have prompted the department to produce a brochure detailing avoidance techniques. Kempema says South Dakota’s brochure should be ready this spring.
           And what about extension trapper Brian Baumgartner’s call about a fish-eating otter? “The depredation call was not verified upon inspection of the site,” Baumgartner said. “But after an interview with the individual, I do believe he’s had some depredation in the past. He’s going to call me when he finds that they’re active again.”
           Imagine that. A trapper tracking a river otter in South Dakota. Just like the good old days.

Dana Hess is an information officer with the Department of Game, Fish and Parks.

Editor’s note: The source for the information about Lee Roy Sevin was an article by Tom Krause in the May/June 2001 edition of American Trapper magazine.