Meandering Manatee

It seems like the manatee in the Hudson slowly moving north. Tom Lake, of the state's Hudson River estuary program, tells me that he's had an unconfirmed report that it's been seen in Haverstraw Bay, north of Croton Point, about 40 miles north of the Battery.

I mentioned in a previous post that a manatee had been up this way (in Long Island Sound, in fact) at least once previously, in 1995. I didn't remember this at all but it must have caused a stir because a former colleague of mine at the Journal News saw the post, checked the paper's morgue, and turned up seven stories in the Westchester paper in August of 1995 -- all of which she wrote herself (and which she said she barely remembered doing).

How do we measure interest in the manatee in 2006? This blog has been averaging 222 page views a day. As of now, today's total is 454 page views, and 101 in the last hour alone.