NEW YORK (AP) - 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. | OK, the editors will be watching this thread real close, so behave. |
| Except for this editor, who's been trying all day long to think up the perfect smartassed, off-color remark and just can't... |
"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." | With a name like Dietland, this is as close as he's gonna get to, well, you know..... |
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's work to revive the river. The Bronx Democrat lined up federal money for a cleanup. | One rodent named after a bigger one. How fitting |
"But I don't know to what extent I imagined things living in it again," he said. |