It wasn’t until the 1700s that Russian fur trappers first discovered sea otters on the western edge of the Pacific ocean. With the thickest hair of any mammal on the planet, sea otters evolved to withstand the frigid waters they make their home. The trappers, seeing them as a windfall for the fur trade, did not understand how integral they were to the landscape.
With large cliffs of brittle sandstone, and churning swells of ocean water filled with swirling kelp forests, the last sea otters of Big Sur were able to hide from the destruction wrought by the fur trade.
Soon after sea otters were “discovered” in North America, their populations began to plummet from trapping. It’s estimated there were once 150,000 to 300,000 sea otters across Russia, Japan, Alaska, Canada, and the western United States before the trade, but by the early 1990s there were only around 2,000 left. Those sea otters were likely saved from extinction by having homes in some of the harder to reach places across their once vast range.
One of those untouchable populations was in Big Sur. With large cliffs of brittle sandstone, and churning swells of ocean water filled with swirling kelp forests, the last sea otters of Big Sur were able to hide from the destruction wrought by the fur trade.
Since 1911, sea otters have been protected from fur trapping, but their numbers only increased locally and didn’t seem to grow past where they already lived. So, in the 60s and 70s, relocation efforts helped reestablish them in Washington state and grow their populations in California. The same efforts in Oregon have failed, for reasons conservationists do not yet understand.
Today, from Santa Cruz to Santa Barbara, you can see these adorable creatures, a canonical character of California conservation, swimming through kelp forests, between surfers, diving below for urchins and small fish, and using stones sometimes passed down through generations, to gather and eat the spoils of this cold, but verdant, ocean.
Cole Hersey is a writer based in Oakland, California. His work focuses on environmental topics and the arts. His work has been featured in Bay Nature, Earth Island Journal, and elsewhere.
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