Meet the Gowanus Canal’s newest resident … or mascot?
A muskrat has made a home along the toxic Brooklyn waterway’s banks by First and Bond streets, a few feet away from one of four houseboats now docked along the Gowanus that the Post reported on in Monday’s edition.
Adam Katzman, who lives in the nearby houseboat, the Jerko, took photos of his new neighbor on May 9.
It wasn’t one of the hipster girls who like to party and sunbathe on other houseboats docked on the canal a few blocks north. It was a muskrat building a nest with weed remnants of a floating garden Katzman is growing in the canal.
According to locals, no one can remember muskrats ever being spotted in the contaminated canal, which attracts little wildlife.
Gowanus activist and urban planner Eymund Diegel said he believes the sudden arrival of the muskrat and herons could have something to do with the arrival of the houseboats at the canal more than a year ago.
He was especially referring to the Jerko. Katzman has set up a floating water garden with bamboo by the boat to promote new wildlife (it filters pollutants out of the 1.8-mile canal and puts oxygen back in).
“The wildlife pictures illustrate how small changes to the Gowanus Canal’s edge ecology can have major impacts on estuary wildlife,” Diegel said in an e-mail to the Post. “This will be a ‘hot’ issue as the [federal Environmental Protection Agency] Superfund team this month will be unveiling its Gowanus Canal Feasibility Study (How to clean stuff and prevent re-pollution).”
Diegel has suggested naming the mascot “GoGo” as in “Go! Go! Gowanus.”
“The muskrat is probably feeding off mussels along the canal edges, as I don’t know where it’s finding enough vegetable root matter along the canal,” Diegel wrote. “In February 2011, a family of 6 muskrats had established themselves in Brooklyn Bridge Park, so it is possible they are now colonizing the rest of the Red Hook and Gowanus waterfront.”
As for Katzman, he says his days are numbered in the Gowanus.
He said he plans to move the Jerko later this year to a marina in Far Rockaway, Queens that promotes artistic boat projects like his experimental vessel. The Jerko includes a homemade rain harvesting system for water, solar panels for electricity and a composting septic system.
The biggest problem, he said, is going to be getting the two-story Jerko through heavy currents to Queens since he added additions to it after arriving to the Gowanus.
Katzman, like the other houseboat dwellers in the Gowanus, have declined to discuss their current living arrangements, which would likely fail to pass the scrutiny of a city safety inspection, according to officials.
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