In a post previously, I had mentioned I’d been seeing a lot of tracks in some of the areas I’ve been snowshoeing/skiing but hadn’t had much luck finding the animals who had made them. That changed this week. One of the tracks I had seen regularly were of a beaver who had been feeding on willows. As I photographed a colorful sunrise, the beaver found me and swam right through the scene I was photographing. Unfortunately, while he hung around for a while, he did leave before the light was good enough for me to try to photograph him. But a short time later, I came across this river otter. The otter, seen here sliding across some ice on the river, caught a nice sized rainbow trout and decided to haul it out and eat it right across the river from me. As it slid back into the water after finishing it’s meal, it almost immediately caught a much larger cutthroat trout. After some struggles, the otter was able to get the second trout to the riverbank but the fish still had a lot of fight left and was able to struggle free.