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Family reports a manatee in Stony Brook Harbor

BY BILL BLEYER | bill.bleyer@newsday.com

7:39 PM EDT, August 21, 2008

In a summer that's already brought us the Montauk Monster and shark sightings at Jones Beach, a Kings Park family now says it's seen a rare Florida manatee in Stony Brook Harbor.

The sighting, so far unconfirmed by anyone else, was reported by Tara and Vito Inzone and their daughter Briana, 8. They were fishing about 6:30 p.m. Wednesday from a dock at the Smithtown town park at Long Beach.

"I was untangling my line at the end of the dock and I heard a spouting sound -- a psffft," Tara Inzone said. "I looked over and I said 'What the hell is that?' My husband said 'It's a dolphin.' I said 'That's not a dolphin. Look at how wide it is.' I thought it was a whale at first. Then its tail came up -- and it was a manatee tail. It was wide and distinctive. I said 'Oh my God, what's it doing here?'"

The family caught three brief glimpses over a 10-minute span, Inzone said. She added they had lived in Florida for two years where "I had seen manatees all the time."

Seeing one this far north is unusual but not unprecedented. Cathy Beck, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Florida, said a manatee sighted last week at Point Judith, R.I., could be the same animal.

A manatee that was 12 feet long and weighed about 1,500 pounds was spotted in the Hudson River in New York City two summers ago on its way to Cape Cod. Another manatee cruised up the East River and out to Rhode Island in 1995.

Most of the time, manatees, also known as sea cows, are found in Florida and Caribbean waters. The slow-moving, grass-eating distant relatives of elephants are listed as endangered by the federal government because their numbers have been reduced by encounters with boats and loss of habitat.

"It's not uncommon to see them pretty far up the East Coast," said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Chuck Underwood. "They forage and they get warm water and they keep going north as long as there is a food supply."

Usually older and larger manatees make the trip north because they can handle water colder than 68 degrees, the point at which most manatees become stressed. The temperature in Long Island Sound now ranges from the high 60s to low 70s and Stony Brook Harbor would be warmer.

"We would become concerned if it did not head south" in the fall, Underwood said.