Posted on 02/23/2007 7:23:50 AM PST by Abathar
NEW YORK - Beavers grace New York City's official seal. But the industrious rodents have not been seen in the flesh here for as many as 200 years until this week.
Biologists videotaped a beaver swimming up the Bronx River on Wednesday. Its twig-and-mud lodge had been spotted earlier on the river bank, but the tape confirmed the presence of the animal itself.
"It had to happen because beaver populations are expanding, and their habitats are shrinking," said Dietland Muller-Schwarze, a beaver expert at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. "We're probably going to see more of them in the future."
Beavers gnawed out a prominent place in the city's early days as a European settlement, attracting fur traders to a nascent Manhattan. The animal appears in the city seal to symbolize a Dutch trading company that factored in the city's colonial beginnings, according to the city's Web site.
But amid heavy trapping, beavers disappeared from the city in the early 1800s, according to the city Parks & Recreation Department.
The beaver that has made its way to the Bronx appears to be a male, several feet (a meter) long and two or three years old, said Patrick Thomas, the mammals curator at the nearby Bronx Zoo.
Biologists have nicknamed the animal "Jose," as a tribute to U.S. Rep. Jose Serrano (news, bio, voting record)'s work to revive the river. The Bronx Democrat lined up federal money for a cleanup.
"But I don't know to what extent I imagined things living in it again," he said.
"http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070223/ap_on_sc/bronx_beaver_2"
The Bronx Beaver?
He's only doing the work American beavers won't do.....
But...when I was there...oh, never mind...
"Ward, weren't you a little hard on the Beaver last night?"
You and I post clicked on this article just for the humorous responses, didn't we?
Please don't tell me Hillary had a wardrobe malfunction with "old crusty".
We seem to have hit the motherlode today :-D
Dam immigrants!
maybe now the dutch will come back...
You had to bring Bush into a beaver post??
I sure hope this beaver understands multiculturalism....
if it works too hard (busy as a beaver) it won't get its NYC welfare check.
I thought Giuliani cleaned this sort of thing up....
No pictures?
JOSE?
Your FRiendly FRiday beaver ping!
This should end those rumors about the Beaver being killed in Vietnam.
"Ward, I'm afraid you were a little hard on the Beaver last night."
(Ward looks repentant.)
We can only hope.
We all love beavers, Bush too.
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