Sea Otter Hunting & Processing

When I was growing up, you had to go far, far away to find sea otters, and since then they've come in really close to our subsistence parts. And sea otter eat so much shellfish, so we have seen a direct impact on the increased populations of them because not a lot of people hunt them. So I, I didn't grow up hunting them from a young age because they were so far away, but in the last 10 years or so, they've come in really close inside boundaries that I've never seen and we haven't seen in many, many decades. So it's important to kind of keep the numbers down and do what you can to help preserve some of the shellfish life that we have. It's so bountiful.

Here close to Heidelberg, we have lots of crab, we have lots of clams, cockles. So we got out on the boat and got a couple sea otters this morning. I'm just going to be skinning them out just to get the hide off. That's all we're doing with them. We'll tag them later.

So I'm just going to cut around the paws, each paw, and then just kind of work the hide off. I'll probably kind of like start from the back end of the sea otter and work my way towards the skull. So I cut up the torso section, and then now I'm just kind of separating the hide from the carcass on either side, the belly area, which is where a majority of your sea otter fur comes from. So you kind of want to do a good job here. One sea otter is about 10-15 minutes.

These aren't too bad. They If you wait too long, the rigamortis sets in, is when they get stiffened up, and it could be a little harder.

When you got a lot to do at once, you go pretty fast. Since we only got 2, we're not in too much of a rush. Their fur is actually really, really dense. That's what makes them so nice for regalia and sewing and stuff, and sought after, is their They've got a million hairs per square inch, so actually their skin never really gets wet because they're so dense with fur. So yeah, you need to have a really sharp knife to get through them.

I use a knife with a replaceable blade. One thing I never do is I never use my fish knives or my deer knives or any other knives for otters. I have a specific knife for otter. I just don't like to cross-contaminate, I guess. Sea otters are not the cleanest creatures.

Anytime I'm messing with sea otters, it's, it's, it's its own thing. I normally wouldn't even have my hunting gear on while messing with sea otters, but today we had a deer hunt that turned into a sea otter hunt, so that's why I got my hunting gear on. There's tricks to it, of course. Everybody does it a little different. If you're familiar with taking the hide off of an animal It's all pretty much similar.

It's like as a deer or as a bear, you're just separating the hide from the carcass is all. Small measured cuts. You don't want it to get too carried away, especially with this because it's going to be used for regalia or maybe just tanned in the full and then use as just a pelt. And so you don't want to cut through Shellfish are super important to us. One of the main reasons why we would settle, or any natives would settle in an area like this, was because of our resources that we got around us.

And so a majority of our food comes right below the tide line. And with these guys here digging around and getting to them, you know, the numbers go way down. It gets kind of scarce to find abalone nowadays or to find good rock scallops. Close by. More recently, our number one subsistence, uh, Dungeness crab subsistence area has been getting hit pretty hard by these otters, these same ones that we hunted today, right up in the head of the bay here.

So we see a direct effect of, of them being here, just with, uh, with what we're able to go harvest. People use this for regalia— moccasins, headbands, gloves, hats. It's very, very warm. So we got the sea otter hide taken off of the carcass. Now we're going to just salt it and hang it.

That's the first step of curing it before sending it off to get tanned or tanning it yourself. A lot of people salt it, let it drip dry for 4 or 5 days, and then put it in the freezer. The first step is always salting them. Put a healthy amount of salt because they're going to keep better. That salt's going to help keep them from getting like rotten basically, or start, um, decaying.

So it just kind of cures them a little bit until, until you get to the fleshing or until you can send them off. Come in here in a few days and a lot of the moisture will drip off of there. That's it.