On the Swirl of the Tide. This item is unavailable.On the Swirl of the Tide

On an idyllic sea loch in a remote corner of the Scottish Highlands live several generations of a wild otter family which have been watched over and cared for through more than a dozen years by retired forester Don MacCaskill and his wife Bridget. They named the dominant male Bodach, which means "old man", and discovered that he kept two females and their families in a four-mile territory of coastal waters before he died, aged approximately 12. Due to living in a tidal habitat, these otters are not the strictly nocturnal animals of rivers in Devon and Cornwall, which were brought to the edge of extinction in the 1950s. The opportunites to observe and photograph their feeding, their grooming, their play and their mating in full daylight were therefore unique. This book records these observations.

Bridget MacCaskill was born in Eastbourne in Sussex but has spent nearly all her adult life in Scotland. To her lifelong interest in wildlife and nature conservation is added a deep love of music and literature inherited from her parents. Her husband Don MacCaskill (who took the photographs for this book) has spent all his life in the Highlands of Scotland - as a professional forester and a naturalist. Their fifteen-year study of a family of otters in the Western Highlands was the subject of a Central Television film in the 'Nature Watch' series, first shown in the whole ITV network and then repeated on Channel 4, while it was given a two-page spread in TV Times in March 1991.