Andy Howard Susan Flockhart Andy Howard rarely talks to otters. His success in photographing these notoriously shy creatures lies partly in his ability to blend silently into the seascape, becoming indistinguishable from a rock or clump of weed. Yet on a subliminal level, Howard appears to speak the animals’ language. “You have to think like an otter to succeed in photographing or spending time with them,” he says. The Highlands-based naturalist has just published The Secret Life of the Otter: a book filled with astonishingly intimate images of the creatures at rest, at play and at war. Getting close enough to capture them fighting, gambolling and even mating is incredibly rare.