Where’s Ilya? Help a Manatee
Ilya is play hide and seek with the Fish and Wildlife Service. They’re pretty sure they’ve found Ilya in New York – Now to try to bring him back to warm waters!
We humans have a responsibility to all forms of life on our planet. Saving Ilya is as important to us as it is to Ilya – It makes us earn our “human” stripes.
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Rescue attempt planned for wandering manatee
Ilya, a curious manatee from Key West, is lost in New York. Biologists plan on trying to get him back to Florida — if an upcoming storm doesn’t kill him.
BY ROBERT SAMUELS
Call him a bohemian behemoth.
There he was, a warm-water loving South Florida manatee, some 1,300 miles from home, in the New York Harbor.
“It’s Ilya,” said Charles Underwood, a spokesman for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
Finding Ilya, who was tagged by Fish and Wildlife and given his name a decade ago, has been biologists’ quest for months. The intrepid manatee from Key West, distinctive by the scarring on his side and the chunk of tail missing, was never much of a wanderer.
Then in September, a woman in Maryland reported she had been scared by some odd creature while taking sailing lessons. She took a picture; it turned out to be Ilya. A group of locals in Massachusetts were wowed by a sea cow a few days later. They even tossed him sandwiches. Again, it was Ilya.
Then there have been the sightings around New York City suburbs.
But for the past two weeks, no one has reported seeing a manatee, or any creature matching Ilya’s description.
Then, success. On Thursday, Underwood said the Jacksonville office of the Fish and Wildlife Service received a report of a manatee loitering around a private property in the harbor. They begged the local marine biologists to keep him there as long as they could.
How to get a manatee to stay in one place?
Staff hopes he’s as gluttonous as he is curious. They are tossing him heads of lettuce and carrots.
[Source & whole story: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/miami-dade/story/1285206.html]
October 16, 2009
Tags: biologists, Fish and Wildlife Service, Ilya, Key West, manatee, New York, wandering manatee Posted in: Motivation
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