Beaver seen in NYC : Pure Pedantry

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Jake Young is a MD/PhD student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in NYC getting a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience. He holds a BS and MS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University. If a volcano were to erupt Pompei-style in Central Park, his body would be preserved in a scoliotic posture over his lab desk. Archeaologists would later conclude that he spent most of his day training rats to perform tricks, until he went blind building electrical equipment by hand using a dissecting microscope. But, still, he died happy...because science is cool.

Pure Pedantry is a blog about science -- social sciences and otherwise -- as well as academic and scientific culture. No one can live on science alone, so I also like to dwell on pop culture, periodically explore the humanities, and indulge in other types of geeky goodness.

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Beaver seen in NYC

Category: Aminals
Posted on: February 27, 2007 9:25 AM, by NotoriousLTP

A damn-building mammal...get your mind out of the gutter:

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

"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."

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.

But amid heavy trapping, beavers disappeared from the city in the early 1800s, according to the city Department of Parks & Recreation.

I want to see the beavers try and damn up the East River.

Comments

I grew up in the country and I've always had an affinity for beavers. Everyone else always seemed put off that the beavers had damned up a stream, but I loved it. I used to walk the things for hours looking at chewed up tree trunks with incisor (?) marks slashed along the trunk.

Posted by: Robert P. | February 27, 2007 11:10 AM

Not to be a usage Nazi or anything, but I think the correct term is "dam up." Most would agree that New York is already damned to eternal suffering. It is a Hell of a town, after all.

Posted by: Dave Munger | February 27, 2007 1:20 PM

I agree with Dave, but it's odd that I have seen "damn" used to mean "dam" in at least two blogs today. I first assumed it was intentional. Is it?

Posted by: Mark | February 27, 2007 1:58 PM