Hello! Apologies for being a bit quiet recently… I’ve been buzzing about down South and up North, partying over in Germany and on Skye and all over the place.
I hope to catch up a bit over the next week or so. Watch this space!

In the meantime I thought I’d tell you about something exciting that I received recently…

I am now the proud owner of an official otter license!

With the otter skull… Grrr! (It’s missing the fangs here but they’re also pretty impressive gnashers)

You might, quite rightly, ask what an otter license is (everyone else has…)

You may remember a few blog posts ago I mentioned finding an otter skeleton on a walk from Rubha Hunish down to Erisco village. What I didn’t write in the post is that I bagged it up along with all my other beach-combed treasures and took it home with me.

Because otters are a protected species I had an inkling that I needed a special license to possess the skeleton legally (an intuition that turned out to be right).
Licensing laws such as these aim to protect certain wildlife from being exploited (alive or dead) by the taxidermy trade and other kinds of nasties that might lead to the decline of an already pressured species. Other animals listed as Eurpoean protected species include bats, wildcats and sturgeon.

So I duly printed out and filled in the application form. It required a fair bit of detail and I had to prove that I will be using it for educational or learning purposes rather than for simply keeping as a cool beach find. (Luckily, I can use it to teach volunteers about the effects of marine debris on wildlife at my Art For Oceans beach cleans, so that box is easily ticked)
Once popped in the post all I had to do was wait…

And here it is!
It might not be the most normal thing to get excited about but I’m chuffed to bits to get it through. One step closer to being my own Natural History Museum!