New York City Park staff came across a sick alligator in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park this weekend, the Parks Department said. Park rangers captured the stray reptile and brought it to the Bronx Zoo to be treated.
Park maintenance personnel found the alligator at Lake Prospect Park on Sunday morning, in the heart of the concrete jungle, and noted that it appeared lethargic and in a state of shock possibly caused by low temperatures. On Sunday the maximum temperature in New York was 9 degrees Celsius.
Alligators typically live in tropical climates and are native to the southeastern United States. This one was about 1.2 meters long.
Urban park rangers captured an alligator in a pond in Prospect Park in Brooklyn, New York
NYC Parks/REUTERS
“We are grateful to our guards at the Parks Enforcement Patrol It is urban park rangers who took action to capture and transport the alligator,” a NYC Parks spokesperson said in a statement.
“Nobody suffered any kind of injury in the process of capturing and transporting the animal to the zoo,” the department said.
Alligator attacks are extremely rare in the United States, even in the states where they usually reside. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission counted that there were only 442 incidents of unprovoked bites in the state between 1948 and 2021.
It is not known how the alligator ended up in the lake, but the case has already served for the parks department of the city of New York to issue a public warning against the release of non-native animals in the city’s environment, obviously remembering that it is illegal. You New York City Urban Park Rangers respond to around 500 calls about animals in poor condition every year.