On July 15, 2012, Rick Simek of the University of Michigan-Dearborn's Environmental Interpretive Center snapped a photo of a beaver in the Rouge River in Dearborn.

But what might seem like a normal occurrence could actually be a sign of the increasing water and habitat quality of the Rouge watershed.

According to a piece written by Simek in the EIC's spring newsletter, beaver trapping led to the local extinction of the species in Metro Detroit in the 1830s, with "no traces of the species left by 1877."

Though several other reports of beaver sightings and markings had been reported in recent years in the Rouge and other nearby rivers, Simek's photo is proof of the beaver's return to Dearborn more than a century later.