Beaver is spotted in NYC for the first time in two centuries

[Doondoo]

Beavers grace New York City's official seal. But the industrious rodents haven't 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.



http://www.newsday.com/news/local/newyork/ny-bc-ny--bronxbeaver0223feb23,0,2806788.story?coll=ny-nycnews-headlines