Most of the time, seeing a rodent outside of a Metro station leads to screaming and running away. But this little beaver caused quite a different reaction outside of the Van Ness Metro today.

Jonathan Murray, who lives up the road from the Van Ness Metro, captured the sighting.

“There was a crowd around the beaver,” which was crawling around by the fountain in the Van Ness plaza, says Murray. “It was clearly attracted to the fountains and trying to get a drink of water.”

By the time Murray arrived, authorities had already been contacted. He says that an officer went into the nearby Giant to get a cardboard box to collect the beaver. D.C. Police was present for crowd control, MPD says.

D.C. Animal Care and Control confirmed that it received a call about the baby beaver in a fountain, and that an Animal Control officer picked it up and released it back into the wild. We’ve reached out to DCAC for additional detail.

Paula Goldberg, the executive director of City Wildlife, notes that her organization is forbidden from rehabilitating beavers at the rescue center. “There’s no wildlife rehabilitation legislation in the District of Columbia,” so D.C. defers to Maryland’s law, where “beavers are regarded as a nuisance animal,” says Goldberg.

But the onlookers certainly didn’t find the beaver a nuisance. “There’s plenty of wildlife around here, like deer in the backyard,” says Murray. “But I’ve never seen a beaver alive in the street. This is my first time seeing one in the flesh.”

Updated with information from MPD.

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