New York City Beaver Hunting Intensifies
We reported on the (completely serious, mind you) report of beaver not being spotted on Long Island. That's right, they wrote articles on not seeing any beavers waddling about. But there is, it turns out, a perfectly logical reason why they did not spot the beaver in Hampton.
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.
It's possible that the animal's cloak of invisibility was on the fritz that day, too. (Just for the record, there is no relation to this post and Britney Spear's Beaver entering rehab).
By Woodsprite, Friday, 23 February , 2007 @ 4:15 pm
I, for one, welcome our new beaver overlords.
By TC@LeatherPenguin, Friday, 23 February , 2007 @ 5:53 pm
Feh, he was probably one of ours (Staten Island) who got bored and hopped the SI Ferry to check out the Manhattan nightlife.