We Have Our Whale

If there’s a more ominous symbol of summer, I can’t think of it:

Coast Guard officials spent yesterday searching for a dead whale spotted floating in a busy shipping lane south of New York Harbor.

Officials said that a passing boat had called in the sighting south of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and though helicopter sweeps were done of the area, no whale was found.

“It may have drifted, it may have sank, we don’t know,” a Coast Guard official said.

A spokeswoman for the National Marine Fisheries Service, Connie Barclay, said the animal was likely to be a humpback whale, sei whale, or fin whale, as those species commonly feed in New York waters during the summer.

It’s rare to find a whale so close to the city’s harbor, an assistant stranding coordinator at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Ulrika Mamone, said.

“We do get one or two a year in the shipping lanes heading in,” she said. “This one was quite close.”