Whale, that’s something you don’t see every day.
A humpback made a shocking splash beneath the Brooklyn Bridge on Monday — marking the species’ first visit to the East River in two years.
“It’s much, much more common to see them in the ocean along the coastline. We have only had rare cases of them moving into the river, but it does happen,” Danielle Brown, Gotham Whale’s director of research, told The Post.
Other reports indicate the humpback also swam through the Buttermilk Channel, the narrow passage between Governor’s Island and Red Hook roughly 40 miles from the whale’s typical feeding grounds along Rockaway Beach.
Brown theorizes that the whale might have simply been hunting down a meal — Atlantic menhaden, a favorite snack for humpbacks, is commonly found in the waterway, as well as white perch, striped bass, flounder, black sea bass and more.
Whales typically avoid the city epicenter, perhaps in part because of the high boat traffic, though they very occasionally brave the urban waters to indulge in the surplus of marine cuisine.
Read more here from The New York Post.