How a wild turkey swap with Kentucky helped bring river otters back to Iowa, to the chagrin of some fishermen

Earth Day is often a time to highlight the ways humans ruin the planet. Here’s a true story you can tell your kids with a happy ending, though they’ll also learn that adults are never totally happy.

There once was a brown furry critter that lived in Iowa. The river otter is cute and has long whiskers and almost human-looking hands.

It loves to swim and play in rivers, marshes and ponds, and even does a slip-and-slide on snow or mud banks, lifting its front feet and sliding down to the bottom, shaking off to run back to the top.

If you want to be an animal, Ron Andrews tells kids, be a river otter. No animal has more fun. Andrews is a retired furbearer biologist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, so he must also tell unhappy news.

People liked to kill otters for their wonderful pelts. Otters also had fewer places to eat and live as the Iowa land changed and was drained of wetlands and marshes for farming.

Except for a small surviving few along the upper Mississippi, the river otter disappeared from Iowa by 1929.

More than 60 years later, Andrews and his biologist friends had an idea: Let’s bring the river otter back and welcome them home.

But how? They found a man named Lee Roy Sevin in Louisiana with an otter farm.

He loved them and was good at catching them, but not to kill them. They were too important.

The otters were a spiritual species to native women, and he began to sell them to more than a dozen states where they had disappeared.

Iowa biologists couldn’t pay Sevin the $400 for his otters because it was against state law. So, they got creative.

Kentucky law allowed their purchase. But what Kentucky really needed was wild turkeys, which Iowa had.

An idea was hatched. Iowa would give Kentucky two wild turkeys for every otter it bought from Sevin in a three-way trade.

The first 16 otters were released into the backwaters of Red Rock Reservoir south of Des Moines in 1985.

Andrews didn’t know if it would work. Otters need clean water, and Iowa isn’t known for clean water.

Pat Schlarbaum, of the DNR’s Wildlife Diversity Program before his recent retirement, hoped for the best.

“I like to think of them as a keystone species,” he said. “They need fish to eat and fish need clean water. I guess they are here to guide us to do a lot more with clean water.”

The biologists wanted to trade for more otters but needed all the help they could get.

A group of Iowa State University biology students got together with another idea. They would raise funds and sell T-shirts that read, “They Otter Be in Iowa.”

They raised $8,000 to buy 20 otters to release into the Iowa wild.

“We were bringing a species back in Iowa, not just learning in a classroom,” said Darrin Siefken, of Tripoli, who was one of those students and today owns Crawdaddy Outdoors in Waverly.

More otters were released across Iowa, reaching 345 at 25 sites over the next 18 years. Siefken went to one release in 1988 at nearby Sweet Marsh and for years afterward on his frequent trips to the wetland has seen their descendants at play.

He spent an entire day at a nearby river this early spring watching otters, taking photos as they emerged from holes in the ice with bullheads in their mouth.

Biologists discovered that otters liked areas that have a short distance between a river and a backwater or pond. In the summer, the adept swimmers zip underwater as fish jump in fright, or they spend lazy summer days teaching their young to swim, calling to the young with barks or chirps.

The scientists discovered that otters liked Iowa. Though shy and hard to count, river otters reproduced and spread and were soon spotted in all 99 counties.

Others began to notice them, too, especially river paddlers or visitors to Chichaqua Bottoms Greenbelt near Des Moines, where the old river oxbow and ponds provide a steady supply of everything to eat — fish or crawdads or frogs.

“If the fishing is good, they are like us — they will stay where the fishing is good,” said Doug Sheeley, a conservation ecologist at Chichaqua.

That is where avid paddler Todd Robertson had an enchanting otter encounter. As he paddled the swampy waterways six years ago, an otter and three pups circled his canoe, barking.

They are vocal creatures and mischievous. They bumped the bottom of his canoe and swam away to watch for a reaction.

“It was like covered wagon Native American days,” he said. “It was the first time I had ever had a conversation with an otter.”

Other outdoor recreators report that otters playfully rearrange their duck decoys and swim away after the prank.

But Iowans learned there is another side to the otter. They are big eaters with a high metabolism. To an otter, Andrews says, a pond is a cereal bowl.

They can reach more than four feet long and up to 30 pounds, “their jaws and teeth are strong and they can bite through mussel shells,” said Vince Evelsizer, the state furbearer biologist at the DNR.

They are among the toughest critters to handle upon capture, but rarely bite people.

Fisherman began to see numerous fish heads scattered about the ice or on banks across Iowa, and biologists began to hear their complaints.

In Missouri, the otter reintroduction had led to a booming population that would eat two or three fish a day and sometimes kill more than they could eat. In one region of Missouri, there were 500 complaints from fishermen in one year.

After a long controversy, Missouri allowed trappers to take otters. Today, says Missouri furbearer biologist Laura Conlee, they also allow landowners to remove an otter if it’s doing damage. She said the population has been managed.

In Iowa, Andrews had some of the same issues and a three-month trapping season began in 2006. In the last recorded year of 2016-17, there were 556 otters taken by trappers with an average price around $20 per pelt, but it was far less than its peak of 1,165 three years before.

The otter population is hard to count in the wild, and observation surveys do little more than show they are most prolific in the north-central and eastern regions of Iowa.

Farm pond owners are still upset. Evelsizer says he gets five to 10 complaints a year statewide, often from pond owners.

Gayln Pherigo of Newton said his 2-acre farm pond southwest of Chariton was put in so his family could fish.

“The DNR says to take a kid fishing, but I can’t even take my grandchildren to my own pond because the darn otters killed them all,” said Pherigo, 68. “It don’t take them a week. It’s like a kid in a candy shop.”

Three times he has restocked it, gathering bass or bluegills, and each time he finds the pond dead of fish and complains to the DNR.

The southern Iowa region is home to the highest density of farm ponds in the U.S. to control silt, said Jim Coffey, a wildlife biologist with the DNR out of Chariton.

The issue often isn’t the otters, but old farm ponds have reached their life expectancy, filling in with silt and becoming too shallow for fish to survive winter ice.

He tells landowners that the otters are highly mobile and will flee places where they feel unwelcome. Scare them off or get a dog to do it, though Pherigo says he lives too far away to monitor it and resists the idea that the critters were here long before us.

“That was before there were people here,” he says. “We used to have elk and bears, do you want to bring them back?”

To biologists like Andrews, the return of the otter is the legacy of a lifetime of work.

“Humans beings are responsible for their demise and human beings should be responsible for bringing them back, under solid management,” he said.

The Earth Day story continues to unfold, native animals trying to live in an environment managed by people.

Schlarbaum saw an otter for the first time on his ancestral grounds near Garden Grove, Iowa, while in a tree stand recently. He realized it had taken 30 years and wanted to thank Lee Roy Sevin, who had died on Feb. 8, 2014, for helping bring them back.

It is back along the Cedar and Wapsipinicon, the Des Moines and Iowa, and all of Iowa’s rivers. Coffey saw one swimming by on the Chariton River recently, and its significance hit him hard.

“That day, I also saw a turkey, and my grandfather who was born in 1908 didn’t see one until the 1960s. I saw a trumpeter swan, and I saw a Canada goose and a deer,” he said. “I realized all those had been eliminated from the Iowa landscape. Now they are here, and it’s a testament to Iowa.”