Every so often a story lands that reminds me why I started this website in the first place. This is one of those.
A wild otter has been photographed in the Bronx River for the first time in about 100 years
Not a zoo otter. Not an escapee. A genuine wild North American river otter, mooching along a riverbank in the middle of New York City, behaving like it had every right to be there.
The picture was taken at 11:42pm on 23 June by a motion-activated camera trap belonging to local scientist RJ Hawkins, and announced this week by the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Bronx Zoo. Hawkins said he “could hardly believe what I was seeing” when he sat down to review the images.
I have now looked at that photograph more times than is entirely reasonable. It is grainy. It is black and white. The otter is a small grey smudge, helpfully circled in red by someone who clearly anticipated people like me squinting at it. It is also one of the best photographs I have seen all year.
Otters vanished from New York’s waterways in the early 1900s
Pollution, trapping and habitat loss wiped them out completely. The Bronx River in particular became a byword for how grim an urban river could get, the kind of water that nothing sensible wanted to live in.
And then people spent decades cleaning it up. Community groups, the Bronx River Alliance, the Bronx Zoo, city agencies, and an awful lot of volunteers hauling shopping trolleys and tyres out of the water. Slow, unglamorous, largely unphotographed work, carried out with no guarantee it would ever amount to anything in particular.
Beavers came back in 2007, after more than two centuries away. Now an otter has turned up. And otters are fussy tenants: they need clean water and enough fish to make a living from. One choosing to show up is about the strongest reference a river can get.
This is the bit I keep thinking about
Most environmental news is a slow drip of things quietly getting worse. This is the opposite of that. Somebody made a decision decades ago to clean up a filthy river. Most of the people who did that work will never see this photograph. An otter turned up anyway.
If you need one small piece of evidence this week that effort is not wasted, here it is, in the form of a blurry grey smudge in the Bronx.
Steve’s response has been characteristically dignified
Steve maintains that the newcomer is “deffo my cousin”, has asked whether the Bronx has a decent pub, and would like it on record that he was available for the assignment and simply was not asked.
He has also pointed out, at some length, that he has been saying the river was fine for years.
Sources: The Guardian and the Wildlife Conservation Society announcement. Photograph by RJ Hawkins / Wildlife Conservation Society Education Department.
