Ending a Century-Long Absence
River otters disappeared from central and western New York State over a hundred years ago because of habitat loss, water pollution, and unregulated hunting and trapping. The idea of relocating otters came up in the early 1980s, at which time biologists from the Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC) had already begun returning the fisher, another member of the weasel family, to the Catskills. Finding that old farmland had reverted to forest and that water quality had much improved, the DEC decided that the area could now sustain a sizable otter population. So in 1994 they held public meetings to figure out how it could be done.