‘I saved a starving otter – and she saved me’

A new documentary captures the magic of an unlikely friendship amid the wilds off the west coast of Scotland

Wrapped up against the gusting Scottish wind, a man is strolling slowly along the jagged shoreline with his lolloping puppy. Anyone passing on the road above would notice him bending over the water, pushing apart the thick brown fronds of rock weed – and then being taken aback to see the “pup” sinuously dive beneath the surface and emerge with a crab in its jaws.
“At a distance it’s easy to mistake Molly for a dog,” says Billy Mail. “Otters are so shy and elusive it just doesn’t seem plausible that one would be voluntarily going for a walk with a human in broad daylight.”
Implausible but obviously not impossible, which is why the remarkable relationship between Billy and Molly, the orphaned otter he rescued from certain death in the Shetland Islands, is so heartwarming.
“Most people will go a lifetime without ever catching sight of a wild otter and here was Molly, this skinny bedraggled creature, approaching me, asking for help – so of course I gave it to her.”
Such is the emotional heft of the story that it caught the eye of an award-winning National Geographic photographer and cinematographer. The resulting documentary, Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story is set against the backdrop of wide skies, glittering sea and the austere, elemental beauty of the land.
It is also a salutary reminder of the powerful pull nature can exert and the deep healing it can bring.
“Did I save Molly or did she save me?” asks Billy rhetorically. “I think we found one another at a point of crisis. I was stressed out and a bit ground down – but this little creature took me out of myself and transposed me into the very simple world of an animal that’s going to die unless I intervene. Ultimately, I think we saved each other.”
Otters occupy a very special place in British hearts. With their flat heads, dark eyes set deep into dense fur – up to a million hairs per square inch of skin – and long muscular bodies they are instantly, irresistibly appealing.
To our eyes their playfulness, their squirming, their tendency to lie – luxuriate – on their backs – only adds to their cuddliness. But make no mistake, they are apex predators with teeth that can slice through bone.
In the film we see Billy and his wife Susan’s dog, a rescue collie called Jade, instinctively submitting to Molly’s dominance, dropping her ball and edging away. When Molly comes across seals basking on a rock, they instinctively slide into the water at her approach.
“There was never any question of ‘taming’ Molly or bringing her inside,” says Billy. “She was a wild creature and I was always careful about that. I never even tried to touch her – she could easily have taken my finger off. Sometimes she’ll stick her paw up through the boards of the pontoon and she’ll let me stroke her paw. It’s always on her terms and that’s fine because I never wanted to domesticate her; I just wanted to keep her alive.”
From Ted Hughes to Seamus Heaney, otters have featured in poetry and prose. Most of us are familiar with the novel Tarka the Otter by Henry Williamson. Published in 1927 it was an unsentimental yet poetic work that went on to become such a seminal children’s classic, despite not having been written for younger readers. Its modern-day legacy includes the establishment of the Tarka Trail, a series of footpaths and cycleways around North Devon that follow the fictional otter’s route.
Years later, in 1960 Gavin Maxwell, published Ring of Bright Water about his life on the west coast of Scotland, where he kept several otters as pets. It was later adapted into a family film starring Born Free couple Bill Travers and Virginia McKenna but by then otters were in severe decline, due to the use of new pesticides in farming which impacted their fertility.
They were also hunted for their fur and were considered a pest by fishermen as they can consume large amounts of fish. So fragile was the population that extinction loomed, until in 1978 they were legally protected. Three years later the practice of otter hunting was banned.
Fortunately numbers have subsequently grown thanks to a ban on the offending pesticides and while it is notoriously difficult to effectively count otters due to their elusive nature, this much-loved mammal can now be found in almost every county of England. Scotland in particular has a thriving population which is thought to number around 8,000.
Billy grew up on Shetland, but left in his late teens to pursue a career in the oil industry. Susan, who worked as an HR consultant, was born on the east coast of Scotland but had moved around a lot. Now in their late fifties, they were both based in Aberdeen when their paths crossed in the city’s airport in 2014. They swiftly tied the knot and settled in the city. Both had been married previously and while Susan had two children and four grandchildren, Billy remained childless.
He had always planned to return to Shetland someday, and as his parents grew more frail, he visited them regularly. “I would go over at weekends and notice how different Billy was in this setting,” notes Susan. “Less stressed, happier, energised and fun-loving.”
In 2018 they finally moved to Shetland, where Billy found a job at a council-run energy plant, incinerating waste to generate heat and Susan worked at the airport.
Shortly after they arrived, Billy’s father died of cancer and his mother had to go into care, where she subsequently died of Covid in 2020. By way of distraction, Billy threw himself into the business of building an extension to their home in Shetland. Progress was frustratingly slow and then in March 2021, at the tail end of a harsh winter, when Billy was feeling weary and depleted, Molly came into their lives – and everything changed.
“I was looking out the window and I saw this otter fishing in the sea,” says Billy. “I wondered how close I could get, so I hurried down to the pontoon while she was underwater, phone in hand, in case she came close enough. Then she popped up right in front of me and started to eat the crab she had caught. Then halfway through she turned and looked me straight in the eye.
“I immediately knew something was very badly wrong because there’s no way a healthy otter would remain so close. And then I saw how emaciated she was.”
Bedraggled and skinny, her bones jutting out, Molly was around nine months old and too young to fend for herself. It was clear she was orphaned – later the couple learnt that a female otter had been found dead on the road some time earlier
On the day they met, Billy captured the wholly unexpected encounter on his phone; the footage went on to feature in the documentary, but in the moment the focus was on keeping Molly alive.
Billy fed her fish, dropping haddock on the ground, which she seized and dragged away to eat. He made her a bed from coiled rope under an upturned boat, so she had somewhere dry to sleep.
In the documentary we see Molly at her most curious, variously purring, chirping, barking as she explores everything she encounters. In the absence of her mother, Billy steps in to help her develop the skills she would later need through play, providing her with a freshwater bath bobbing with multicoloured balls and taking her on walks to explore the rock pools.
The film came about after a local builder who was helping Billy with the house extension mentioned a friend who would “love” to see Molly. That friend turned out to be wildlife filmmaker Charlie Hamilton James, based in Bristol, who worked with David Attenborough on The Trials of Life and has made programmes for the BBC including Springwatch and Natural World.
He first came to visit in September 2021. Captivated by the quietly tender relationship between Billy and Molly, who was then just over a year old, he asked to make a film and returned early in 2022. The documentary, which took just over a year to record, deserves the praise it has garnered.
The cinematography is breathtaking. In many ways it is as much a love letter to the dramatic terrain of Shetland as an intimate study of this unique bond between homo sapiens and lutra lutra. Even more unexpectedly it is also a poignant exploration of the impact Molly has on Billy’s state of mind.
The calmly-measured voiceover is provided by Billy himself and by Susan who notes more than once that caring for the little otter filled an unspoken emotional gap in her husband. “Billy missed out on having children and it was really beautiful, absolutely lovely to witness the nurturing way he was with Molly,” reflects Susan.
Her husband concurs: “Did I feel the pain and loss of not having kids? Absolutely. I remember looking forward to taking my kids swimming, playing football, going fishing and doing all the things that you do with them. There’s a sense of sadness and loss, it’s like a bereavement and you have to grieve it in the same way. You get over it but the pain never goes away.
“When Susan saw me with Molly, she glimpsed a side of me she had never seen before and that felt so good.”
“She’d hang out with us whenever we had a barbecue, lying on her back, rolling in the grass, stealing the lime from our drinks. This beautiful wild animal wanted our company and that warms your heart.”
As Billy becomes more obsessed with Molly’s wellbeing, Susan comes across as affectionately exasperated. He fills the freezer with so much fish, they have to buy a second one. At one point he takes to his shed to do some DIY – but instead of getting stuck into the job at hand, he constructs a little house identical to their cottage, for Molly, complete with a Ring camera, so they (he) is alerted and can watch her when she visits.
“I saw the humour in it,” admits Susan. “I may have played it up a little for the cameras but if anything, Molly brought us even closer than before. Having the film crew staying here enriched our lives too.”
Towards the end of the documentary, which follows Molly through the seasons we see her grow in strength and independence. She no longer relies on Billy for food and disappears for days on end, returning with a thickset male in tow; Susan and Billy amusingly christen him “Bozo”, to convey their disapproval at the interloper.
Soon a pregnant Molly pregnant regularly turns up at their door looking for fish to supplement her diet. “At least she doesn’t bring home her washing!” Susan quips. A short time later, she gives birth inland and when her pup is old enough, brings him back to her house in the garden, where the pair play endlessly together.
“The pup is terrified of people,” says Billy. “Which is exactly how it should be. The last thing I would want is for him to be friendly and I feel proud that Molly has done the right thing and instilled fear into him so he will keep his distance, as he should.”
Now, as Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story is due to be released, Molly is pregnant again. She turns up for food then leaves, with all the entitlement of a teenager.
“She pops over the way we might say ‘I can’t be bothered cooking tonight, let’s get a takeaway’; we’re more than happy to provide the takeaway,” smiles Billy.
At the outset, Susan warned him not to get too excited about filming. “I wasn’t convinced that ‘otter swims up, man feeds otter, otter swims away’ was the stuff of blockbusters,” she recalls wryly. Maybe not a blockbuster, but arguably something much more special; riveting, uplifting and utterly enchanting.
Billy & Molly: An Otter Love Story is streaming on Disney+ from November 14, and airs on November 15 at 8pm on the National Geographic channel.