Louisiana wildlife trapper retires, putting Illinois' river otter recovery program on the endangered list

Photo courtesy of the Illinois Department of Natural Resources

Nature-loving Illinoisans are getting another chance to watch endangered river otters in their habitat. But that chance could be lost again. Fans of the playful animal need to raise $40,000 to buy 150 wild river otters from a Louisiana trapper this fall. The trapper, Lee Roy Sevin, is the country's only reliable supplier and he's retiring next spring.

Bob Bluett, who is directing the River Otter Recovery Plan for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources, says the state gets its otters by trading wild turkeys through some creative agreements with Kentucky. That state has almost completed its otter recovery plan. Since Illinois' program began last year, 131 wild river otters have been released into the Wabash and Kaskaskia rivers. Fifty more otters will be released into the Kaskaskia River in the next few months.

As a capper, the department wants to release the extra 150 otters into the Illinois River. Bluett says the Illinois River is a key area for re-establishing populations because of its size, relative isolation and importance as a link between populations in other river basins. Release sites identified by the recovery team include locations on the Sangamon, Spoon, Mackinaw and LaMoine rivers, as well as the mid- and upper-Illinois River.

Brent Manning, director of the department, says the fund-raising effort is necessary because costs originally scheduled over a two-year period must now be raised by November. He approved the transfer of two $10,000 grants, one from the Furbearer Fund and one from the Wildlife Preservation Fund. Bluett says the grants will allow the purchase of some animals. But to ensure success, the recovery team needs to release 25 otters at each of six sites over the next year.

River otters were a common sight for the first settlers of Illinois. But by the late 1800s unregulated harvests and destruction of habitat caused populations to decline almost to the point of extinction. River otters, protected under the Illinois Endangered Species Act, were listed by the state as threatened in 1977 and reclassified as endangered in 1989. Illinois had just two small populations, one along the upper-Mississippi River and its tributaries in Carroll, Jo Daviess, Rock Island and Whiteside counties and one in the Cache River basin in southern Illinois.

Bluett says one of the reasons the department feels confident about the success of the transplanted otters is the improvement in water quality in the state's rivers over the past two decades.

"There was a time," Bluett says, "when the Illinois River was populated mainly with goldfish and carp." Now, he says, the river is healthy enough to sustain a full complement of species, including the river otter.

Beverley Scobell

Native mussels disappearing An increasing number of non-native zebra mussels is showing up in the Illinois River. This summer 60 million free-floating larvae passed Havana each second, according to a sampling by the Illinois Natural History Survey. The zebra mussel larvae attach themselves by the dozens to anything hard, including native mussel shells, and grow into a colony that suffocates the host animal. Doug Blodgett of the survey says preliminary observations show a significant decline in native mussel numbers in study areas this year over last. The same holds true for aquatic snails. The snails are not killed outright, but they are unable to reproduce when the zebra mussels attach to their shells.

4/October 1995/Illinois Issues