My house is only a mile from the edge of Bristol, my front door was wide open, and I was playing the Rolling Stones very loudly out onto the river. The 6,000 watts of flood lighting that illuminate the river outside the kitchen window were on, the dog was wandering in and out of the house and I was screaming, "Look, there's an otter!" And yet it hung around for a good quarter of an hour before vanishing.

Otters are fabled as Britain's most secretive creatures and were believed to live only in a few small pockets in Britain's remotest parts. No longer is this the case.

In Shetland, the otter population in Europe's largest oil terminal, Sullom Voe, appears to be as dense as any in Europe. Sullom Voe couldn't be more industrial - it's big, loud and ugly; but then so are Glasgow, Cardiff, Newport and Swansea, where otters seem to be thriving, too. In Newcastle, an otter even turned an old Ford Cortina in a scrap yard into a breeding holt. Even Britain's most industrial areas, such as Port Talbot in Wales and Avonmouth, have otters.

This is the new face of our modern otter. It has adapted to us and is thriving. And perhaps by cleaning up our rivers, we have adapted to it. It is still a very secretive creature, but it seems to be becoming less terrified of us, and with good reason - otter hunting was outlawed in the 1970s. Otters also suffered heavily throughout the 1950s and 1960s from the use of pesticides such as Dieldrine, Aldrine. But, today, they are spreading out of their strongholds of Wales, the South-west and parts of the North to recolonise their old haunts.

You can't, of course, recolonise one of the world's most densely inhabited countries without coming across the odd town. River quality is no worse in a city than it is downriver, and many of our cities have decent fish populations these days - which leaves otters with only a lot of noise and disturbance to contend with, and it appears that they just don't worry about it.

It's just over 70 years since Tarka met his maker. Perhaps if he'd been a little more streetwise and taken up residence in the back of an old Ford Cortina, he might have lived a little longer.

From an original article in the December 2002 issue of BBC Wildlife Magazine