Otters at dawn
A family of river otters, a lakeshore blind and the coldest week of an early autumn.
River otters are restless, loud and almost impossible to predict. A ranger mentioned a family using an old beaver lodge at the north end of a small lake, so I set up a low blind on the shore well before sunrise.
The first two mornings were fog and nothing else. On the third the lake was perfectly still and four heads appeared at once, chirping at each other and diving in turns. One surfaced a few metres away and looked straight at the blind.
I kept the shutter quiet and the lens low; after a minute it lost interest and went back to fishing. Working this close is only possible because the blind was in place long before the animals arrived.