Mammal Monday

The in-an-out dolphins were hard to capture on camera, but as we came back through the channel between Coney and Breezy Point, a pod got quite close to us.

I had not been aware that there was more than one species of bottlenose dolphin. There are three. The local one is called Tamanend’s Bottlenose/Tursiops erebennus. The common name is new, dating to 2022. It honors a seventeenth century Lenni-Lenape leader, who was also known as Tammany, a name with a lot of resonance in NYC history because of the (non-native) Tammany Society/Tammany Hall.

Yes, that’s Coney Island, of the mind and elsewhere, in the background.