May 24, 2007
The Return of the Otter Posted by John Steele Gordon at 04:05 PM EST In 1993 I wrote an article for American Heritage on the history of the American environment, which you can find here. I pointed out, 14 years ago, that while the environment has had its ups and downs, it had been mostly—and strongly—up since the first Earth Day in 1970. This trend has continued, indeed accelerated, since then. Just today there is an article in The New York Times on four peregrine falcon chicks who are doing fine in a nest box high atop the Throgs Neck Bridge, where the East River gives way to Long Island Sound. Peregrine falcons nest elsewhere in the city these days as well, including on the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, thriving on New York’s inexhaustible supply of pigeons, one of their favorite foods. Nearly exterminated by the 1950s because DDT caused their eggshells to thin, the species was removed from the endangered species list in 1999. Although the environmental news has been increasingly good for the last four decades, the average person might not know it because (a) the media prefers bad news and (b) the environmental organizations depend on bad news to raise money. That’s why global warming has been a godsend for the environmental Chicken Little crowd as the water, land, and air have gotten cleaner and cleaner, as many species that were doing poorly are now doing well and many that had been extirpated from areas have been successfully reintroduced (such as wolves to Yellowstone and the California Condor to the High Sierras). As a sidebar to the environmental story, I wrote a piece on the environmental history of North Salem, the small town in northern Westchester County where I live. (Just scroll down past the main article to see it.) I noted, in 1993, that a bald eagle had recently been sighted in town for the first time in decades. Today they are sighted often, and I even saw one land next to the Croton River as I was boarding the train at the nearby railroad station. Yesterday morning my tenant knocked on my office door and said, “Guess what!” An avid fisherman, she had been out in her rowboat the previous evening on Titicus Reservoir to enjoy the glorious late spring weather and, hopefully, to rustle up a little supper. Suddenly she noted, quite close, fish jumping out of the water, not in the way they occasionally do in pursuit of a bug (rustling up a little supper of their own), but in the way fish do to elude predators. As she watched, a furry head appeared and looked around for a few seconds before plunging back in pursuit of his own supper. Its short, rounded ears, large size, and long, tapering tail gave it away. It was an otter. These immensely beguiling creatures have fur that was especially valued by the early Dutch traders in Nieuw Amsterdam, and they paid the Indians handsomely to hunt them. They were soon very rare. With the increasing pollution of local streams in the first half of the nineteenth century, the otter was gone from this area long before the twentieth century dawned. Now they are back, another piece of the infinitely complex web of life returning to an area only 44 miles from Grand Central Terminal. I hope the Sierra Club, et al., will forgive me for spreading the good news.
|
