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River Otter Spotted in the Bronx for the First Time in More Than 100 Years

The first documented otter sighting since the early 1900s is a promising sign that decades of Bronx River cleanup are finally paying off.

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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.........

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