Some Happy News! Dolphins Frolic In the Bronx (River)

New Yorkers were thrilled this week when a couple of dolphins swam up the Bronx River and were seen cavorting as far north as Starlight Park. 

“This is great news,” gushed NYC Parks on Twitter. “It shows that the decades-long effort to restore the river as a healthy habitat is working. We believe these dolphins naturally found their way to the river in search of fish.”

In 2018, the department released 400 adult alewife, a type of herring, into the river to help improve the water ecology. It is believed that the fish have since been fruitful and multiplied and the dolphins are here for it. Not bad for waterways that were treated as open sewers for most of the 19th and 20th centuries. Even the Bronx Zoo and the New York Botanical Garden, both just north of Starlight Park, were dumping thousands of gallons of animal waste and other pollutants into the waterway as recently as 2002.

Another two dolphins – or perhaps the same ones? – were spotted last week in the Whale Creek Tributary next to Brooklyn's Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. Not long ago, these waterways were foul repositories of our worst garbage.

It isn’t always good news when dolphins make an appearance in the city. In 2013, a sickly dolphin swam into the infamous superfund site Gowanus Canal and went belly up. (An autopsy determined that this dolphin had arrived there sick.) But the recent arrivals look healthy enough and can be taken as a sign we’re doing something right.

Photo credit: Ocean Giants / WCS