If you happen to go up the old racecourse at Groenendaal in search of the Scottish Highland cattle, you may have to make do with these otters, especially on a Sunday when the animals won't play bovine ball. They don’t like sightseers.
Although otters seem out of place here, the old Groenendaal landscape actually makes them rather plausible neighbours. The Augustinian priors once managed a whole chain of lakes and fishponds fed by the IJse, all within easy reach of the present racecourse. In monastic times those ponds were working assets rather than decoration, stocked with fish for fasting days and carefully controlled for water levels. Clean, fish-rich water with quiet, vegetated margins is exactly what the Eurasian otter prefers, and before the nineteenth- and twentieth-century decline caused by pollution and habitat loss, otters were widespread across wetlands in Belgium.
So while the sculpture might look like a whimsical addition to the old racecourse, it unintentionally recalls a time when the forest edge and the IJse valley offered real habitat for this sleek river-hunter.