Rare white otter mesmerizes Ottawa-area wildlife observers

On a river near Perth, Ontario, on a recent autumn evening, a boatload of wildlife photographers was silently following its quarry.

With an electric trawling motor providing propulsion, the waters remained millpond-flat as they drifted upstream. But then there came a splash like a gunshot, as their target’s tail tapped the water and the creature began to dive beneath the surface.

The legendary white beaver had sniffed them out.

Ottawa photographer Dennis Jackson never expected to see such a rare creature, despite photographing wildlife all his life.

After seeing white otters on a boat trip with his neighbor a few weeks earlier, Jackson was eager to return to the river with pre-eminent Canadian naturalist Michael Runtz, his wife Britta Runtz, also a professional photographer, and a CBC reporter.

Beyond hoping for another sighting, Jackson wanted to answer one question: Was this otter an albino — which would be an unlikely survival story, given that most albino animals are nearly blind — or leucistic, a genetic condition that causes a partial loss of pigmentation?

The white beaver had reappeared at dusk, but after smelling the humans it was unclear whether he would stick around to answer the question.

As photographers waited with bated breath, the white otter glided underwater near the boat, its light-coloured tail flashing, before surfacing in a patch of reeds. The creature then climbed to the ground to shed its coat, revealing a patch of black hair on its front left paw, and the eyes were clearly black.

“With true albinism, you can’t produce any darker color, so the eyes are always pink, so I’d say it’s a leucistic beaver,” Runtz concluded.

The recently retired Carleton University professor was very pleased to see this.

“To see a completely white otter with dark eyes and black feet, it’s incredible!”

Even better, they had the photos to prove it.

Runtz said, “I’m very happy just to see it, I would have been almost as happy if I didn’t get any pictures. But I have to admit I’m a little bit happier that we even managed to get pictures.”

Like other wild creatures, beavers sometimes produce offspring with color changes, but lighter coats can make them more visible to hunting.

White otters are so unusual that the Canadian Museum of Nature holds in its collection the skin of a leucistic otter that was collected in Rainy River, Ontario, 1918.

Dominique Fauteux, a research scientist at the museum and an expert in mammalogy, says the rarity of the white otter suggests it is not an evolutionary beneficial mutation.

“That kind of mutation, that genetic mutation, hasn’t been very common in millions of years,” he told CBC. “The evolutionary pressure to keep that gene in the gene pool is not very strong.”

For Jackson, the scientific impact of the sighting was less important than its specificity.

“This is absolutely one of the coolest things I’ve seen,” he declared as he steered the boat toward home.