One thing about life in California, you’re constantly learning new ways that nature, as beautiful as it is, can ruin your day.
Going camping in the Sierras? Lug a bulky, awkward, bear-proof canister to store your food so you don’t get mauled. Going surfing? Great white shark encounters are possible almost anywhere along our magnificent, 840-mile coast.
Still, even in California, who worries about being savaged by an otter?
When otters attack!
Yes, otters — those adorable little scamps with nearly human faces that mostly lie on their backs at the surface, using their bellies as snack trays.
Last weekend, veteran swimmer Lynnette Bellin was gliding along the surface of Lake Tahoe, a place so calming and familiar that she considered it her “sanctuary,” when she felt something grab a leg and start pulling.
There was so much force, she said, she initially thought she was being attacked by a person. After she finally fought her way to shore, she pulled out her phone and shot video describing the ordeal for Instagram.
Wide-eyed, bloody and panting, she tells the camera, “You guys, I just got attacked by an otter.”
“I’ve been swimming in Lake Tahoe for, like, 25 years and this never happened,” she added. The incident was also reported by my colleague Karen Garcia.
Bellin said she was too terrified to get back in the water, so she walked back to her starting point with her face, hands and legs smeared a deep crimson.
Calmer and breathing normally, she quipped: “Now I’m just freaking out all these people on the bike path because I’m, like, dripping blood everywhere.”
A hard lesson about wildlife
Bellin said she received 38 stitches and a hard lesson: “I didn’t even know there were otters in Lake Tahoe.”
Californians had heard stories of otter attacks before, but no one had been hurt.
Beginning in 2023, surfers in Santa Cruz were terrorized for the better part of two years by a female otter who became known as “841”.
“She went on kind of a rampage,” said my colleague Susanne Rust, who covered the saga. The otter started “attacking surfers and taking their boards, you know, just being kind of menacing.”
The internet is full of photos of 841 munching on purloined surfboards and then sitting on top of them, snarling at baffled young men in wet suits who try, and then think better of, fighting her for their property.
The story went viral, Rust recalls, dragging local, state and, ultimately, federal officials into a Keystone Kops-like battle of wills.
“There was this hilarious period in 2023 when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was trying to capture her because they were worried she might actually hurt somebody,” Rust said. They spent weeks trying to “lure her to their boat with a surfboard tied to a rope … but didn’t get anywhere.”
Nobody knows what sent 841 over the edge. She was pregnant at the time and seemed to calm down, at least for a while, after giving birth. “So she may have been having some hormone issues,” Rust said.
Or maybe she was just a bad seed. 841 was born in captivity to a mother who also was known to be a “problem otter,” Rust said.
A reporter makes an otter apology
The saga completely upended Rust’s previous ideas about otters, which had been built on trips to the Oakland Zoo and the heartwarming children’s book “Oscar Otter,” which her mom, a kindergarten teacher, read to her as a kid.
But there were hints about the otters’ dark side along the way.
In college, a boyfriend who would become her husband had been helping a professor with field research in Northern California streams when he claimed he had been attacked and chased by river otters.
Incredulous, Rust said she mocked him “mercilessly.” They’d spot a furry animal, like a squirrel, and she’d claim to have seen it eyeing him and ask, “You scared?”
They’ve since divorced.
After hearing the swimmer’s story from Lake Tahoe over the weekend, Rust did one of the hardest things a person can do.
She called her ex and apologized.
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