"When I first reviewed the images, I could hardly believe what I was seeing."
That's RJ Hawkins, the local scientist who set up a motion-activated camera along the Bronx River and, on June 23 of this year, caught a North American river otter on film. The Wildlife Conservation Society's Bronx Zoo confirmed the sighting and announced it publicly on August 19, calling it the first documented river otter in the Bronx section of the river in roughly 100 years. Hawkins works with WCS's Education Department, which is based at the zoo and runs a long-term camera trap program along the water.
If you walk, run, or bike the Bronx River Pathway through Eastchester, this is your river. The Bronx River runs south from the Kensico Dam through Edgemont, Tuckahoe, Eastchester, and Bronxville before it crosses into the city, and the otter turned up in that same watershed. You've probably passed within a few hundred yards of wherever that camera sits without knowing it was there.
What the Camera Actually Caught
River otters aren't casual visitors. They need clean water and a steady supply of fish, which makes them one of the more reliable signs of a healthy freshwater system. WCS framed the sighting as evidence that decades of cleanup and restoration work are paying off, not as a one-off curiosity. Don't expect to spot one on your evening walk. Otters are shy and mostly nocturnal, and this particular sighting only happened because of a camera trap that's been running quietly for longer than most residents realize.
This Isn't the River's First Comeback
The otter is the third species in roughly twenty years to reappear in this river after a long absence, and that pattern matters more than any single sighting.
- A beaver returned to the Bronx River after more than two centuries away. The Bronx River Alliance named it "José" after Congressman José E. Serrano, who secured millions in federal funding for the river's restoration, and the Alliance still points to that beaver as a turning point in how the public understood the cleanup.
- In April 2009, NYC Parks announced it had found alewife herring in the river for the first time since the 1600s, after fish passage work at some of the old mill dams that had blocked their migration route for generations.
- Now, in 2026, an otter.
Each of those is a different kind of animal with different requirements, and each one showed up only after the water got measurably cleaner. The cleanup effort traces back to 1974, when a small group of residents led by Ruth Anderberg formed the Bronx River Restoration project in response to a river that had become, in the plainest terms, an open sewer through much of the twentieth century. That work eventually grew into the Bronx River Alliance, formed in 2001 to coordinate the cleanup across dozens of community groups, agencies, and businesses. Westchester towns were still discharging raw sewage intermittently as late as 2006. The cleanup wasn't a single project with a ribbon cutting. It was decades of unglamorous work, fish ladders at old dams, shoreline restoration, and water quality monitoring that most people driving the Bronx River Parkway never noticed.
The Stretch You Already Walk
The paved section of the Bronx River Pathway from Bronxville through Eastchester to Crestwood has a reputation among regular cyclists as the smoothest, most reliably maintained stretch of the whole trail. It runs asphalt the entire way, gets heaviest weekend traffic near Bronxville Lake and Crestwood Lake, and parking near the trail is tightest on any day but Sunday, when Metro-North opens up free spots at the Bronxville, Tuckahoe, and Crestwood stations. The Crestwood lot sits closest to the path itself, which is why you'll see it fill up first on a clear weekend morning.
Parkway Oval, the 14-acre park in Tuckahoe that Eastchester owns and maintains, sits directly along that same jogging and bike path. The park has baseball and softball fields, soccer fields, and a playground that fills up most weekends, and it's also where the town held its Fourth of July fireworks this year as part of the 250th anniversary tribute, with live music and a DJ running from 7 to 9:30 in the evening on July 11.
That's the odd part of this story. The river running past a soccer field where families gather every weekend is the same river a scientist quietly monitored for months before catching an animal that hadn't been documented there in a century. Nobody put up a sign.
A Summer Eastchester Built Around This River
This has been a loud summer along the water, in the way towns get loud when they're marking a big anniversary. The 250th National Anniversary Committee, a joint effort between the Town of Eastchester, the Villages of Bronxville and Tuckahoe, the Eastchester Historical Society, and Eastchester Veterans, built out a full calendar. Fireworks at Lake Isle came first, on June 20. A golf outing and dinner followed on June 29, based at Lake Isle Country Club and Mulino's at Lake Isle. Then came the parade on July 11, a BBQ at Lake Isle Country Club, and the fireworks at Parkway Oval the same evening.
Running alongside all of that was the Lake Isle Summer Concert Series, which brought a different act to the park most Wednesday nights through the season. Boyz Nite Out opened on July 8, sponsored by the Friends of the Eastchester Library. Faded Vinyl followed on July 15, backed by the Eastchester Tuckahoe Chamber of Commerce. On July 17, the lineup shifted to Tramps Like Us, a Bruce Springsteen tribute act, sponsored that night by Supervisor Colavita and the Eastchester Town Board along with Gigante Restaurant. The McLean Avenue Band played July 22 with support from the Hendry Sylvester McNamara School of Irish Dance and the Eastchester Irish American Social Club, and Tangled Vine closed out the month on July 29, sponsored by Boiano Dental. The season wrapped with the Bookends Band on August 5.
All of that happened within walking distance of a river that was, in parallel and without a single mention on a flyer, having its own quieter kind of anniversary. Fifty-some years of restoration work, and this was the summer it produced an otter.
What to Actually Watch For
You're not going to see the otter yourself. It's a camera-trap discovery, and river otters are built to avoid exactly the kind of foot traffic that fills the pathway on a Saturday. What the sighting actually confirms is that the water running past your usual route, from the Kensico Dam down through Eastchester and into the Bronx, has recovered enough to support an animal that needs real habitat, not just a channel for runoff. That's a different way to think about a path you may have only ever used to get your steps in.
And if a long walk along the river leaves you hungry, Crestwood Pizzeria has been sitting directly across from the Crestwood Metro-North station since 1996, close enough to the trailhead that it's become the default stop for a lot of regulars, the kind of place where the staff learns your order before you finish saying it.
None of this changes what the pathway looks like on a Tuesday morning. It just means the river running alongside it has quietly earned the kind of company it hasn't kept in a hundred years, and that the same fifty years of unglamorous cleanup work that made this year's concerts and fireworks possible along the water is also the reason an otter showed up on camera in June.
If you're the kind of person who notices these details about where you live, that same attention tends to matter when you're thinking about a home in this area too. That's the kind of local knowledge Kamala Vittal brings to every conversation about Eastchester and the towns around it. Let's connect.
