Ilya back home

Ilya, the manatee that made trips to the Chesapeake Bay and New England before being trapped in a tiny New Jersey creek, is back in Miami.

Chesapeake manatee trapped in New Jersey

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story on October 17 about the manatee Ilya, which was last seen near a refinery along the Arthur Kill in northern New Jersey. Story here.

Ilya is the same individual seen in the Chesapeake Bay several times, and then near the mouth of the Susquehanna River. He later wandered into waters off of New England.

The bull-beggar in Virginia

In Ghost Stories From the American South, W.K. McNeil recounts a folktale gathered from a man by the name of Mart Rankin:

I was batchin' then, up there in Virginia. Been out on my horse, and my little dog had followed me. When I got to the lane -- guess I was about two hundred yards from the end of it -- I spied two men. They was walkin' together purty fast, keepin' step. I watched 'em. They had four times as far to go as I did. I kept on watchin' them an' never took my eye off of 'em till they got to the lane. Then the little old dog jumped a rabbit, and I turned to look.

That quick they disappeared or turned into somethin', one. They was a black thing about the size of a sheep thrashed around an' took up through the field, tearin' up brush heaps where there wasn't no brush heaps an' makin' a lot of noise. It didn't look like nothin' I'd ever seen. Don't know what it was, but they had turned into it..

Another book of folktales, Virginia Folk Legends, recounts a tale gathered from Mrs. R.V. Brayhill:

My grandfather Pernell had a large farm and in those days the farms all had to be fenced and the cattle run outside [the fence]. And between his farm and the Crysel farm was a haunted woods. The road was a narrow wagon road going through a thick pine forest between the two farms, and often people had seen and heard things as they pass[ed] through this pine thicket. My mother and my Aunt Bittish said that often as they went over this road at night that they would hear the most pitiful cry, as if someone were in distress, and then an animal that resembled a big black bear would brush by them and then it would suddenly vanish.

And one time the fence around the farm caught fire about three o'clock in the morning. And Aunt Bitty saw the fence burning and she come running over to my father's to get him and my brothers to go help put the fire out. And as she was coming through the pine forest there was something that looked like two men came running behind her, and as they passed her they suddenly disappeared. Bitty said she was scared almost to death, but it was closer to my father's than it was back home, and she was through the haunted woods. So she came running to my father's for help. The family left the haunted farm and went to another community.

A last bit of information regarding this is contained in An Encyclopedia of Fairies by Katherine Briggs:

Its meaning is unspecified, but it did not perish with the 16th century, for there is still a Bullbeggar Lane in Surrey, which once contained a barn haunted by a bullbeggar, and traditions of a bullbeggar who haunted Creech Hill near Bruton in Somerset were recollected by Ruth Tongue from oral tradition in 1906 and published by her in County Folk-Lore (vol. VIII, pp. 121-2). In the 1880s two crossed bodies were dug up in quarrying operations, and crumbled to dust when they were exposed to the air. For some unexplained reason they were supposed to have been a Saxon and a Norman, and after this finding, Creech Hill had a bad name and was supposed to be haunted by following footsteps and a black uncanny shape. A farmer coming home late one night saw a figure lying on the road and went to its help. It suddenly shot up to an uncanny height and chased him to his own threshold. His family ran to his rescue and saw it bounding away with wild laughter. Another night traveller was attacked on Creech Hill and held his own from midnight to cock-crow with the help of an ashen staff. This bullbeggar was considered a bogy or bogey-beast rather than a ghost because two bodies were found.

While I'm not certain where in the state these stories were gathered, in Accomack County there is a Bullbegger Creek. This is on the peninsula of Virginia on the eastern shores of the lower Chesapeake Bay. Sightings of Bigfoot and so-called "devils" have surfaced from the adjacent regions of Maryland's Eastern Shore.

Not Pennsylvania or Maryland, but close enough to be irresistible. Just by virtue of the name, I'll be needing to keep my eyes open as to things at Bullbegger Creek.

Another Bay manatee reported

The Annapolis Capital for July 20, 2009 reported that another manatee had been seen in the waters of the Chesapeake Bay near the mouth of the Susquehanna River. Policeman Marcus Rodriguez said he saw the aquatic mammal in the waters of a marina in Havre de Grace, Maryland. Rodriguez said that the manatee nosed around among aquatic weeds for a bit and then swam away.

The manatee was identified as an individual dubbed Ilya. Previous sightings of Ilya had been recorded only from the manatee's more typical Southern waters. By August of 2009 a manatee identified as Ilya had ranged as far north as Cape Cod, in Massachusetts.

A Chesapeake loggerhead

The Baltimore Sun reported on August 14 about a sighting of a loggerhead turtle in the Chesapeake Bay off of Kent Island. This is interesting in regards to sightings of Chessie that have taken place in that part of the Bay.

Imagine sitting in a small boat in quiet, open water on the Chesapeake Bay and peering down into the murky depths, when suddenly a massive SOMETHING breaks the surface right in front of you, not four feet away.

That's what Jack Cover reports happened to him this week as he was out on Eastern Bay, not far from Kent Island. Cover, general curator for the National Aquarium, was looking for comb jellies to add to the aquarium's jellyfish exhibit.

Cover reports in his blog that his gaze was diverted briefly by a cownose ray swimming on the surface in the distance, when without warning "a big object lauched out of the water like a polaris missile." His initial shocked reaction was that a diver was surfacing, then he recognized this was a marine diver - a loggerhead turtle.

"It was the strangest experience,'' Cover told me. He says he wasn't the only one startled, either. The sea turtle, after gasping for air, took one look at him and dove back under water. He watched it surface again four more times, each time farther away.

It's a rare treat to see a loggerhead this far up the bay. Cover says they're seen more often in the lower bay, drawn in from the Atlantic in a quest for horseshoe crabs and blue crabs to feed upon.

But it may become rarer still to see the big sea turtles anywhere in the bay, or elsewhere along the Atlantic coast for that matter. A group of biologists reviewing the status of loggerheads for the National Marine Fisheries Service has found that their populations off both the Atlantic and Pacific U.S. coasts are in danger of extinction. The chief threat is from being unintentionally caught in fishing gear, primarily commercial longlines but also gillnets. Their nesting beaches also are under pressure. Dustin Cranor of Oceana, a Washington-based environmental group, reports that Florida officials say this year was one of the worst on record for sea turtle nesting there, in one of their prime areas for laying eggs.

Oceana and other conservation groups have petitioned the federal government to declare loggerhead populations on those two coasts endangered and to impose protective measures. For more, go here and here.

Chessie the sea monster

'Chessie' is the name given to the sea serpent that supposedly inhabits the waters of Maryland's Chesapeake Bay. While the first confirmed sighting of a reptilian oddity that may or may not have been Chessie took place in 1933, the sighting of a 'dragon' on the Patuxent River, legends of a reptilian monster haunting the confluence of the Piscataway Creek and the Potomac River date back to the 1800s. Chessie was sighted in 1965 swimming in the South River near Annapolis. In 1977, it was sighted where the Potomac empties into the Chesapeake, and in 1978 the serpent returned to haunt Calvert Cliffs. That same year, something left three-toed tracks near Leonardtown on the Potomac. Sightings continued throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1982, Robert Frew filmed a 'giant eel' off of Love Point, on Kent Island. Reports of Chessie have died off since the 1980s. Leatherback turtles in the waters of the bay have been mistaken for Chessie, and a manatee which made its way into the Chesapeake in the 1990s was nicknamed Chessie after the monster.

Manatees in the Chesapeake

From the Washington Post (Sept. 26, 2008):

Two West Indian manatees were sighted in a Chesapeake Bay tributary near Baltimore this week in a rare appearance of Florida's beloved sea cow in Mid-Atlantic waters.

Gail Hill, who lives in the Baltimore County suburb of Essex, spotted the bulbous creatures about 6:15 p.m. Tuesday while she was tossing white bread and potato rolls into Norman Creek for the local mallards and Canada geese. At the end of the dock, something wide and gray came to the surface.

"At first, it looked like a big barrel popped up, and then it went under again," Hill, 57, said yesterday. She thought, at first, it might be a large carp. Then, noting a bump in the middle of its back, she thought she might be seeing the blowhole of a porpoise.

Then the animal raised its head to breathe.

"It's got a bulby-looking nose . . . almost like that Michelin tire commercial" mascot, she said. Another soon appeared by its side. A neighbor identified the animals right away: "He said, 'That's a manatee.' "

During that encounter, first reported by the Baltimore Sun, Hill snapped several pictures. Yesterday, the manatee expert at the National Aquarium in Baltimore said the sighting seemed legitimate.

"It is, more than likely, a manatee," Jennifer Dittmar said. One clue, she said, was the bump on the back. It's not a blowhole, she said, but a barnacle, which manatees often pick up in their slow-motion wanderings.

Manatees, docile vegetarians, have been declared an endangered species; collisions with boats are a serious threat. Their population is estimated between 3,000 and 3,500, and their home territories are Florida and the Caribbean.

But some have been spotted around the Chesapeake. The most famous was Chessie, a manatee that visited several times in the mid-1990s and was named for its resemblance to the bay's mythical sea monster.

Dittmar said the Baltimore aquarium receives three or four reports of sightings every year -- usually in August or September, after the bay's water has been warmed all summer. She asked anyone who spots a manatee to call the aquarium scientists' pager at 410-373-0083.

Scientists say that to travel north, the mammals use the Intercoastal Waterway, which can offer a buffet of underwater grasses, or they traverse the open Atlantic Ocean. It's not clear why they come.

"I don't know why they do it," said Cathy Beck, a scientist who studies manatees for the U.S. Geological Survey. She said she didn't know if climate change was playing a role. Beck said her current concern is whether these roaming manatees will find their way back south before the winter, because they cannot stand water colder than 68 degrees.

In Essex, Hill said the two manatees vanished when she and a neighbor got into a boat to follow them. "I've been looking ever since," she said.

"They're not the prettiest faces," she said. "But there's something lovable about them."

--David A. Fahrenthold, "Manatee pair make trip north to frolick in Md. tributary"