Miriam Darlington's interest in otters borders on the obsessional.She has spent a year of her life following them, seeking out experts as passionate as she is, sleeping in the wild to track them down. Local, distant, rural, seaside and urban habitats are of equal interest to her. She writes passionately, poetically, beautifully about otters - of course - but also about the natural world in general, conjuring up vivid pictures of seeping estuaries, rough moorland, urban wasteland, tumbling streams and lazy rivers. This is an evocative and worthwhile read, only sometimes failing to engage my commitment as a reader. It was a big ask to take me otter-hunting for a whole year. Miriam Darlington jolly nearly succeeded. ( )

Darlington has a thing about otters, bordering on an obsession with them. In this book she shares that obsession. The otter was almost made extinct in this country, and were only made a protected species in 1978. Since then they have made an amazing recovery, assisted by the cleanup of the river systems across the UK, and there are signs of otters in a lot of rivers across the UK, provided you know where and how to look.

In this book she travels all around the country in search of the elusive otter, and meets with people who are possible more obsessed that her, including James Williams, author ofThe Otter Among Us. She goes to the Cardiff University to meet the people on their Otter Project, where they perform autopsies on otters that have been killed, mostly on roads, and collect DNA data from these unfortunate creatures.

There is not so many actual experiences of her encounters with otters, as she says they are elusive, and are often active at night, but this is as much about the experience of being close to the wildlife of the rivers and estuaries, and being immersed in the fantastic landscape of Western Scotland. But as she looks for evidence, she finds their trails and spraints in many places close to home and whilst on her travels. The few encounters that but she does document the few that she has.

This is also a book about the wider natural environment of the UK, whilst we do not have the same mega fauna of Africa, it is still a fascinating country that we live in, in terms of wildlife. I liked the writing style, it is very evocative and she gives you a wonderful sense of place. ( )

Good and an interesting account of a couple of years the author spent looking for Otters in the UK. Mostly about otter poo though as that's seen on rather more occasions that the elusive animal itself.

As an account of just how hard it is to see Otters, it works very well. despite extensive research and contacts with the right people, and many grueling and arduous trips and excursions - including standing in an estuary for hours, she only manages a few very short glimpses. Somehow though it fails as a narrative. There's nothing about the author, her family, and very little about the people she encounters, instead it's divided up into rough areas of the country, each of which she visits. We do get a few descriptions of some of the other wildlife she meets, and lots of otter poo. Apparently they leave this in prominent locations as a marker to other otters. And so every time the author visits somewhere, we get a description of the poo she manages to find. Frequently this is the only indication that there are otters in the area.

Not brilliant but often enjoyable. Fairly lightly written with a deft touch for the scenery, it would have been improved with some personal interactions. ( )

This was a wonderful read. I tend to be wary of contemporary nature writing, often finding it contains too much authorial navel-gazing, but my fears were unfounded in this case. The book chronicles the year that Darlington spent travelling around the UK in search of otters, using poetic (but never flowery) prose, with references made throughout to otters in literature. The landscapes and waters are evocatively described, as are the wildlife and plants which live alongside the otters. Though everything is filtered through the author's gaze, she never puts herself in the foreground, and she manages not to romanticise or anthropomorphise the animals. There is a lot of factual information contained in the book, but the way it is structured means that it is not a straightforward primer on otter lore; you would need to look elsewhere for that. I strongly recommend this for nature lovers and as a gift for those who need to be converted. (It's never preachy, but makes it clear that we have a long way to go before otter populations can truly be said to have recovered.) ( )