Ken Hickman has been photographing wildlife for years: burrow-dwelling kangaroo rats on the brink of extinction in the Santa Cruz Mountains, busy beavers building a dam in a reed-lined pond in San Luis Obispo, mountain lions wandering along trails in the South Bay. But when he recently reviewed footage captured by one of his cameras stationed in Cloverdale Ranch Open Space Preserve, the researcher couldn’t believe what he was seeing.
It was a river otter.
“Checking wildlife cameras can be like Christmas, but river otters haven’t been known to occur on the San Mateo Coast since the 1800s,” Hickman said in a news release from the Midpeninsula Open Space Trust earlier this month. “So I knew Midpen and State Parks biologists would be as surprised and interested as I was to see the photos.”…