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From the point of near extinction in England, the otter has made an extraordinary comeback. But just how easy is it to spot one? Jon Henley hunkers down to wait

So here we are on a pin-bright, late-May morning, Kevin O'Hara and I, squatting in the mud beneath a small humpbacked bridge over the River Lynne, half an hour from downtown Newcastle, looking for poo. Not just any poo, mind. A special kind of poo. Otter poo.

"Now this," O'Hara had declared, pulling off the road in the 4x4, "is a perfect little ottery sort of a river. Just look at it. Clear, clean water: full of brown trout. Reeds, bushes, trees, good habitat. And 15 years ago this river was orange. 'No otter in its right mind would ever live here,' one local naturalist wrote, a man who knew his stuff. Let's see now."

We clamber over the fence, through knee-high nettles and down a steep bank rich in wildflowers whose names I wouldn't pretend to know. "Aha," says O'Hara, pointing to a sudden splash of bright green amid the gloom beneath the parapet. "That's good: where they crap a lot, you get this green flush from the nutrients. And here we are: look! Here we go."

The poo (or spraint, as it is technically known) is small, black and crumbly. O'Hara picks it up, places it carefully in the palm of his hand, and sniffs. "They say it smells like jasmine tea," he says. "It smells like otter crap. Lovely, though." He pulls out a small magnifying glass and pokes at it. "Brown trout scales and stickleback bones," he says. "Magic."

Not many people in this country know more about otters than Kevin O'Hara. He saw his first when he was a child, on holiday in the Lake District in the early 70s, back when everyone thought they were headed for extinction. He was fishing, and this shape just slid off the bank into the water, slipping beneath his rod in a blur of sleek brown pelt and silvery water.

He was hooked. "Don't know why, particularly," he says. "They're a remarkable animal. Formidable creature. Doesn't matter how many of them I see." His dissertation, at the University of Sunderland, was on otters in the river Wear (this was in 1991, by which time, basically, there weren't any). And since then he's worked at the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, the Environment Agency, and now the Northumberland Wildlife Trust, pretty much always with otters.

We're otter-spotting now for several reasons. First, because Britain's fifth national otter survey, to be published later this summer, will confirm that otters have, in the last decade or so, made the most extraordinary comeback, almost from the dead, and are continuing to fare well in almost all areas of the UK. They are one of our very rare natural success stories.

Second, because this year marks the 50th anniversary of Gavin Maxwell's Ring of Bright Water, which â€" once we had all dried our tears; remember the ditch-digger's spade coming down? â€" was the book (and film) that won even the hardest hearts over to the idea that otters are the cutest mammals imaginable (they are not, of course; they are extraordinarily efficient killing machines, but more of that later).

And third (I cannot tell a lie), because I've never seen one outside a zoo, and I want to. So O'Hara picks me up in the 4x4, and we head off for Druridge Bay. It's seven in the evening, clear sky, no wind, sun's warmth still lingering, midges everywhere. We settle into a wooden hide on Druridge pools, part of a glorious coastal wetland reserve run by the trust. A couple of hundred yards away, beyond the dunes, the surf rumbles.

There were otters here every day last week, O'Hara says. You could set your watch by them.

He has lost count of the number of otters he has seen. A couple of years ago, when he was Otters and Rivers (he's now Wetland Conservation), O'Hara was so plugged in he could more or less spot them at will. He utters, though, a word of warning: "If they're here, we'll see them. They're not shy, that's so far from the truth it's funny. But they are otters. They can just decide, sod that, I'll go somewhere else today. It's like fishing: if you caught one every time, it wouldn't be called fishing, would it? It'd be called catching."

No respecters of reputation, though, otters. You can wait patiently for hours, weeks even, and never spot one. Then again, O'Hara says, once he was leading an otter safari of 40 people along a remote northern river; he had done his spiel, about how they'd be really lucky to see one, mustn't be disappointed if they don't, all that, and one of the group said: So what's that, behind you, in the water? "It stayed there for 20 minutes, playing to the gallery," O'Hara says. "Unbelievable."

It wouldn't have taken much, though, and none of us would have stood a chance of ever seeing an otter. Once upon a time we hunted them, diligently. The "sport" was only stopped in 1978. As far back as the 12th century, King John kept a pack of otter hounds, and was partial to a spot of otter on Fridays (the church having ruled that since otters lived in water and ate fish, their flesh obviously wasn't meat).

The Victorians were, as in many things, enthusiastic and efficient otter hunters. Otter tails became bell pulls; paws became keepsakes; the dog otter's baculum, or penis bone, was prized as a tie-pin. There are photographs of mutton-chopped Victorian hunting parties standing behind vast mounds of dead otters.

In the north-east at least, O'Hara says, otters were considered a courageous and noble prey, capable of a spirited defence. The Victorians did have the decency to outlaw the barbaric practice of hunting otters with spears and nets, but they still used "stickles" â€" metal-tipped wooden poles which the advancing line of huntsmen would hammer repeatedly into the gravel, driving a cornered and desperate otter back up to the waiting dogs. An animal that put up a particularly brave fight was said to have "given good law".

(Henry Williamson's Tarka the Otter, which won the Hawthornden prize for literature in 1928, catches the bloodthirstiness â€" and the unbearably overblown romanticism â€" of the whole business. "Can't bear it myself," sniffs Kevin. "Too soppy. Though that last passage, the mortal struggle with Deadlock the otterhound, the bubbles that come up to the surface and then no more . . . You'd have to be pretty unfeeling for it not to get to you.")

In the hide, it's getting chilly. The sun is sinking. Swallows arc and dip over Druridge pool; shellduck, a heron and a pair of swans ripple its surface. A bunch of lapwings arrive. Something breaks the water over on the far side â€" a long, v-shaped wake â€" and O'Hara stiffens. "Come on," he mutters. "Be what I think you are." But nothing shows. "You'd know all about it if it was an otter," he says. "The birds would go crazy, everything would suddenly take off, there'd be one hell of a racket. Nobody hangs around when Mr Otter shows up."

The real menace to otters, though â€" the invisible enemy that nearly killed them all off â€" was not hunting, but chemicals. The species came within a hair's breadth of extinction in England in the 1970s, a victim of intensive farming methods that destroyed their habitat, and particularly of organochlorine pesticides such as dieldrin and aldrin.

Passing lethally up the food chain, they finished in the tissues of so-called top predators such as peregrine falcons, sparrowhawks, foxes â€" and otters. The consequence was blindness, immune system collapse and breeding failure. By the time of the first national otter survey, in 1977-79, of some 3,000 riverbank and wetland sites examined just 5.8% showed any evidence of otters. Experts reckoned there were maybe only tens left.

But by the last survey, completed in 2002, that figure had risen to almost 35% â€" a spectacular fivefold increase in barely a quarter of a century. From their last-ditch redoubts in Scotland, Wales and Cornwall, otters have now bounded back into every county in England, and been seen in more than 100 town centres including Stoke, Birmingham, Leeds, Newcastle and Wolverhampton. There may be 5,000 or more.

People like O'Hara have worked hard to improve otters' habitat, planting thousands of trees, fencing off long stretches of riverbank, digging out ponds, reconnecting oxbows, building breeding and resting sites and neat little under-bridge ledges so otters won't have to cross main roads. But the real difference has been water quality.

The last of the insecticides was banned by 1984; some £30bn has been spent on improving sewage treatment since 1990; and according to the Environment Agency, Britain's waterways are probably now in a better state than they have been at any time since the start of the Industrial Revolution. "Clean water's the thing," says O'Hara. "If you don't have that, you can improve their habitat all you like and they'll never come back."

In fact, otters have come back so successfully that they are now arousing the ire of fishermen, and especially fisheries, furious at the animal's ability to clear an artificially stocked lake of prize fish in a matter of days. Some fisheries have lost tens of thousands of pounds; there are even calls for a cull.

This makes O'Hara very cross. "It's just mad," he says. "Most of those fish shouldn't be there, and they're only that size because of the mountains of artificial bait thrown at them. Otters aren't a problem on a naturally stocked lake or river; the Tyne's full of them, and it's the best salmon river in England. But the main thing is, it's easy to protect a lake from otters. You put a fence round it. These people just don't want to pay. And if you present an otter with an open larder, he'll help himself. He's a predator. It's what he does."

It's cold now, and dark. As we head back to the car, a barn owl, pale and ghostly, floats silently across the path. "We'll come back tomorrow," Kevin says. "This is beyond a joke. I've got a reputation to keep up."

We're back soon after dawn, to a still and beautiful morning. Wagtails, herons, ducks a go-go. No otters. In their absence, O'Hara does his best. In his prime, he says, Mr Otter measures 4ft 6in from tale to snout, and weighs up to 30lbs. He patrols maybe 10-12 miles of riverbank, and can keep three families within that range. He'll visit each in turn, spending up to three months at a time with the youngest: he's a good dad. (Mrs Otter spends up to 15 months with her cubs before they leave home.)

They communicate by high-pitched whistles; short coughs "like an ageing smoker"; and by crapping copiously whenever and wherever another otter will come across it: "For an otter," says O'Hara, "sniffing another otter's spraint is like reading the paper. Full of news." Eighty per cent of their diet is small fish; the rest is what comes along: mice, voles, birds, frogs. The biggest prey O'Hara has ever seen one take is a full-grown swan.

"We anthropomorphise, don't we," he says. "We see the sweet snout, the sleek coat, the button eyes. We think Wind in the Willows, Ring of Bright Water. He looks like a jolly whiskered little chap, we say. Rubbish. Otters are formidable predators. They carry no body fat; when they're not sleeping or resting, they're hunting. They're strong, fast, ruthless. They've been top predator in England since the bears and the wolves went, and they're not about to let anyone forget it."

Except us, of course. They couldn't care less about us. At 10am we give up. O'Hara is disgusted. "Bloody typical," he says. "Otters. Always being otters." On the way back to the station, though, he relents. "The thing is," he says, "in my dissertation in 1991, I wrote: 'The prospects of the otter returning within the next 50 years are very bleak.' I was wrong, and I'm glad. Because we need species like the otter. They give us that little thrill of the wild that we're missing in our 21st-century lives."

But wait. There's a postscript (or two). On the train, I get a text from O'Hara: "Just had a call â€" otter 'performing' right now, bang in front of visitors centre at Hauxley nature reserve, two miles from where we were. Typical." And 10 minutes later, just as we're pulling out of Durham station, high on an embankment, I glance down. A small river (the Browney, I later calculate) winds through a watermeadow.

There's a small patch of exposed mud and gravel and weed and stuff on the inside of one bend, and I think to myself, O'Hara's words still in my head: well, that's an ottery kind of a place. And something, quite big, brown, long, shifts and shrugs and slides into the water and is gone. Was it? I don't know; I saw it for less than a second. O'Hara thinks it might have been. "Typical," he says.

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