{"id":897383,"date":"2026-10-28T09:38:26","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T09:38:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/897383\/"},"modified":"2026-10-28T09:38:26","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T09:38:26","slug":"river-otter-seen-on-san-mateo-county-coast-for-first-time-since-the-1800s","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/897383\/","title":{"rendered":"River Otter Seen on San Mateo County Coast for First Time Since the 1800s"},"content":{"rendered":"

The rare wildlife sighting highlights habitat restoration success on California\u2019s coast and raises questions about the otter’s origins.<\/p>\n

Oct 27, 2026<\/p>\n

Updated 3:56 pm PT<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

A trail camera photograph shows a river otter at the Cloverdale Ranch Open Space Preserve.\u00a0(Courtesy of the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District )<\/p>\n

For the first time in over a century,\u00a0a North American river otter<\/a> was spotted on the San Mateo County coast.<\/p>\n

The semi-aquatic mammal was captured on a camera trap and has been seen twice now \u2014 once in July and once in September \u2014 cruising around the coastal prairie and waterways of the Cloverdale Ranch Open Space Reserve, just south of Pescadero.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe opened up the images and all celebrated and were really excited because we had never heard of a river otter in this area, or really anywhere on the San Mateo County coast,\u201d said Matt Sharp Chaney, a wildlife ecologist with the Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District, which acquired the 6,700-acre preserve in 2023.\u00a0<\/p>\n

River otters used to live all along the West Coast, from Alaska to Santa Barbara, before they were almost entirely wiped out in the 1800s by the fur trade.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Where this individual creature came from and how he or she got to the ranch is a mystery. The nearest documented sighting of a river otter is 20 miles away, down near Lexington Reservoir in the Santa Cruz Mountains \u2014 quite a distance to travel.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"AThe Cloverdale Ranch Open Space Preserve, on the San Mateo County coast. The river otter was seen on a camera trap, stationed in the vast preserve. \u00a0(Courtesy of Midpeninsula Regional Open Space District)<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d really love to hear if anybody on the San Mateo County coast has seen a river otter or signs of a river otter,\u201d Sharp Chaney said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Regardless, conservationists are taking the otter\u2019s presence as a signal that restoration of the area is working.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact that this watershed is healthy enough to support a river otter, that has really high energetic needs and can feed on fish and frogs and turtles and birds\u2019 eggs and a wide variety of items, is just really exciting,\u201d Sharp Chaney said.<\/p>\n

He said he hopes members of the public will upload their animal sightings to the River Otter Ecology Project\u2019s community science platform, Otter Spotter<\/a>. More sightings, he said, could help fill in the gaps and give clues to where this otter came from.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a very resilient and amazing landscape that supports a lot of rare species,\u201d Sharp Chaney said.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The public can access some areas of the ranch, and more open access is in the works. Meanwhile, otter fans in the region will be keen to see if any other individuals show up. Sharp Chaney said he hopes for the area\u2019s current intrepid explorer to find a mate.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would be very excited if another otter distributed into the same area and they were able to start a family unit,\u201d he said. \u201cThat would be extremely exciting news for me.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The rare wildlife sighting highlights habitat restoration success on California\u2019s coast and raises questions about the otter’s origins.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":897384,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[51],"tags":[79,201],"class_list":["post-897383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=897383"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897383\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/897384"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=897383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=897383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=897383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}