CANNON BEACH, Ore. — When Tabea Goossen’s friend said she might have seen a sea otter at Ecola Point in early June, Goossen laughed and said, “Oh, no. It was a seal.”
She knows — everyone who cares about these kinds of things knows — there are no sea otters in Oregon.
Hunted to near extinction for their furs, the state’s last resident sea otter was killed more than 100 years ago. While sea otter populations have been established in Washington state and parts of California, reintroduction efforts in the 1970s failed in Oregon.
Usually, the only sea otters that do show up in the state are dead, washing in from somewhere else.
Then Goossen, a citizen science volunteer, went out last week to conduct her regular surveys of a shorebird called the black oystercatcher. As she wrapped up her work and prepared to leave the beach, she scanned the waters one last time with her binoculars.
“And lo and behold, I saw what looked like a sea otter,” she said. The animal was swimming on its back. She saw its distinctive flipper feet.
“I’m looking at that and I’m thinking, ‘Well, that’s a sea otter,’” Goossen said. “And I thought maybe I was seeing things.”
She wasn’t.
Later, Goossen went out with Chanel Hason, of the Elakha Alliance, a nonprofit working to reintroduce sea otters off the Oregon Coast. Hason confirmed the presence of two sea otters.The U.S Fish and Wildlife Service has since identified one of the sea otters as male.
This rare sighting of two live sea otters off Oregon’s North Coast is an exciting development for groups looking to reintroduce the animals in Oregon and represents a unique opportunity to observe otter behavior here.
Hason says the otters are most likely visitors from Washington state where there is an established population of around 2,000. But these out-of-state visitors could give conservation groups and researchers valuable information about what food the otters are seeking out and what kinds of habitats they seem to prefer here.
Hason says all of this could help inform future translocation efforts.
“It’s a huge deal,” Hason said of the sighting. As far as she knows, it is the first significant sighting off Oregon in several years.
“It would be the first time to collect foraging data on sea otters in Oregon,” added Brittany Blades, curator of marine mammals at the Oregon Coast Aquarium.
Sea otters are unique among marine mammals when it comes to the kind of information an observer can glean just by watching them feed. The otters dive down and surface with their food in hand — or mouth. Then they flip onto their backs and float on the water, eating the food they caught.
An observer can time the dive and then track how long the otter stays at the surface. They can see what species the otter is eating, the size and quantity of the food. From all of that, Blades says, you can calculate what kind of energy the animals expend and gain in their hunt for food. You can get an idea for how a population is doing in a certain location.
Blades wasn’t able to find the sea otters off Cannon Beach when she visited on Sunday and Monday — no one has reported a sighting since the weekend. But she hasn’t lost hope. With the busy Fourth of July weekend and potentially more eyes on the ocean, Hason thinks they could be spotted again.
Sea otters are a keystone species that, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “has an effect on its environment disproportionate to its abundance.” They are an apex predator, whose foraging helps maintain healthy kelp forests and seagrass beds.
Intensive hunting for their pelts decimated sea otter populations along the West Coast and both the southern sea otter and northern sea otter are listed as threatened under the federal Endangered Species Act.
While the Elakha Alliance is pushing for reintroduction of the animals, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service does not have any active proposals to bring sea otters back to Oregon. Last year, the agency held open houses with stakeholders across more than a dozen coastal communities to gather information and perspectives on potential reintroduction. Jodie Delavan, a spokesperson for the agency, says a summary of those meetings will be released soon.
The meetings came after then-President Donald Trump signed a federal budget in 2020 that included an unfunded directive to the US Fish and Wildlife Service to look into sea otter reintroduction in the Pacific Northwest.
A subsequent study by the agency found that reintroduction was feasible, but challenging. There are some concerns about potential impacts to coastal shellfish fisheries, and bringing sea otters to the region isn’t cheap. The Fish and Wildlife Service estimated reintroduction would cost between $26 million and $43 million over a 13-year period.
For now, the two otters spotted near Cannon Beach will be counted in a census of Washington’s otters and the Elakha Alliance is funding a fisheries study to look at what sea otter reintroduction could mean for shellfish fisheries on Oregon’s southern coast.
In Cannon Beach, the tides are starting to shift. Goossen says the low tides coming up may not be low enough for easy access to the areas at Ecola Point where the sea otters were spotted.
The timing worked out well for Goossen to see the otters and alert Hason, but she feels bad that she didn’t believe her friend, Pam Avila, back at the beginning of June.
Goossen says Avila has yet to say, “I told you so.”
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Is it a sea otter?
Ever since a volunteer spotted two sea otters near Cannon Beach over the weekend, Chanel Hason with the Elakha Alliance has been getting emails about other sightings. All of these have turned out to be North American river otters so far — a common mistake, she says.
Here’s how to tell if what you’re looking at is actually a sea otter…
- Both animals forage in the intertidal area, but river otters’ paws are all the same size. They are very agile. You’ll see them running over beaches and rocks
- Sea otters have small front paws and big, flippered back feet. If you see something with big flippers floating on its back in the ocean, it is probably a sea otter.
- Sea otters are larger than river otters
Hason encourages people to get photo or video evidence to send to the Elakha Alliance for identification.