February 16, 2009
Okay, the media can’t help themselves. Expect more “Leave-It-To-Beaver” headlines and jokes, as this news gets out.
Wildlife officials are celebrating the sighting of an American beaver (Castor canadensis) in the Detroit River for the first time in decades, signaling that efforts to clean up the waterway are paying off.
A photo taken by a Detroit Edison motion-sensitive camera in November 2008, shows a beaver on company property.
The Detroit Free Press announced on February 16, 2009, that a beaver lodge has been discovered in an intake canal at a Detroit Edison riverfront plant. Officials consider the beaver spotted by the utility’s motion-sensitive camera marks the animal’s return to the river for the first time in at least 75 years.
Photos and video were taken in November 2008, but Detroit Edison didn’t want to release them until they could ensure the animal’s safety.
“It’s part of that larger story of ecological recovery,” John Hartig, the Detroit River refuge manager for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, told the paper.
Over the last number of years, other species have returned to the Detroit River area, said Hartig, citing sturgeon, whitefish, peregrine falcons, bald eagles and walleye.
“If it’s cleaner for them, it’s cleaner for us, too,” Hartig said.
See the video here.
About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.
Filed under Breaking News, CryptoZoo News