For Plantnerd:

One recent evening, Stephe Sautner sat behind his desk in the Bronx Zoo’s administratio building, hoping that José hadn’t washed away. José is an American beaver, and after Sautner discovered him, in February, during a lunchtime stroll along the Bronx River, the zoo celebrated José as the first beaver to claim New York City residence in more than two hundred years. (“Dam! The Beaver Returns to New York,” Gothamist reported.) But a month ago a tempest of rain, sleet, and snow submerged José’s lodge, a twelve-foot-long, four-foot-high engineering marvel of sticks, rocks, and mud. No one had seen him since.

José’s forebears had a storied, if strained, relationship with New York. The state once claimed tens of thousands of beavers—Albany was originally named Beverwijck, “district of the beavers”—but, even if the beavers managed to elude John Jacob Astor’s traps, then deforestation, factory waste, pop bottles, and discarded tin lizzies evicted them from their watery tenements. For centuries, the best places in the city to see a beaver have been on the city seal, the ceramic tiles of the Astor Place subway station, and the Field House of the Brearley School, home of the Beavers. Tonight’s mission: find José.

Courtesy The New Yorker.