An otter in New York. It sounds like the title of a direct-to-VHS children’s movie starring Jason Alexander as both the voice of the otter and his human nemesis. Seeing an otter in the Bronx River doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is. It’s a huge sign that decades of efforts to clean up one of the city’s most polluted waterways are finally paying off.
As the Wildlife Conservation Society and Bronx Zoo reported this week, a motion-sensitive camera caught a glimpse of a North American river otter swimming in the Bronx River in June. It’s the first documented sighting of an otter there since the early 1900s.
Nature is healing, as they say. And it didn’t do it on its own. It took tremendous effort from countless people who spent much of the 19th and 20th centuries cleaning up a waterway the city and its people treated like a moist garbage dump. Factories would dump chemicals in it. Slaughterhouses would toss in animal waste.
It was filled with oil, sewage, tires, appliances, and assorted detritus that definitely wouldn’t have been there without us. That’s why it was on us, more specifically those of us in New York, to clean it up.
In time, pollution drove away animal life, including river otters.
An Otter Was Spotted in the Bronx River for the First Time Since the Early 1900s
In the 1970s, people started to wake up to the fact that they were poisoning their own waterways, driving off the wildlife that helps maintain delicate ecological balance, so conservation groups, government agencies, and Bronx communities started the long, hard work of restoring it to its former glory. One surefire sign that the work has paid off is the return of wildlife. It took a while, but the otters might be back.
It joins a growing list of evidence that the efforts have not been in vain. Beavers returned in 2007 after being gone for more than two centuries. Camera traps have captured images of turtles, muskrats, and a variety of birds that had been around for several presidential administrations. The otters themselves are particularly encouraging since they were considered indicators of freshwater health.
They’re near the top of the food chain wherever they hang out, and need clean water and enough fish to survive. If they’re back, it means the water is well on its way to being healthy enough to sustain them.
Now just a matter of not letting up, not rescinding efforts at the first signs of success. Besides, researchers don’t know whether the otter is living there permanently or just stopping by on the way to somewhere more hospitable. Still, the picture, captured by scientist RJ Hawkins with a motion-activated camera, represents the potential rejuvenation of a place that was once so trashed and disrespected that not even animals wanted to live there.
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