What was that thing in the water? A dolphin? A shark?
Gail Hill was calmly feeding the ducks off her pier in Essex's Norman Creek on Tuesday evening when she spotted what was unmistakably a large form moving just under the surface. Wait, make that two.
It was only when one of the beasts popped its whiskered snout out of the water that Hill realized the visitors were manatees - a not-too-common animal in the Chesapeake Bay and its estuaries. Normally, they're sunning themselves in balmy Florida.
"I wasn't sure what it was at first, not until ... I saw the bulbous head," Hill said yesterday. "They're kind of ugly."
There are legions of manatee lovers who would take issue with that assessment, but no matter. For Hill, the sightings were a first-time event in 34 years of living next to the creek, normally populated by geese, blue herons and "turtles bigger than trash cans."
For scientists, the appearance of the gentle, endangered herbivores, which can live 50 years or more and weigh as much as 2,000 pounds, was another in a growing body of sightings of manatees far from their natural habitat.
Jennifer Dittmar, who runs the stranding-response program at the National Aquarium in Baltimore and who spoke with Hill yesterday morning, said there have been about three or four reports of manatees in the bay every summer for the past four or five years, although not all were confirmed as the real thing. Officials were unable to confirm Hill's sighting yesterday.
"It's actually becoming less uncommon," Dittmar said of visits by manatees, the most notorious of which was Chessie, who was rescued near Queenstown in 1994, fitted with a radio transmitter and ultimately flown back to Florida - only to be spotted the next year off Rhode Island.
