“I was on the bridge picking up trash,’’ local resident Glen Miller said. “I was also looking for river otters along the bank when I looked back to the west toward the Back Bay. That’s when I saw a big wake, an oddball wake swimming along the shore.

“At first, I thought it was an alligator. But I could not really make it out because it never surfaced. I then saw what I thought was a tail and I knew it wasn’t an alligator.’’

What unfolded left Miller puzzled.

At first the “it” being seen was taken to be an alligator. Then the “it” turned out to be a something else off Mississippi.

The first sighting was inside the Ocean Springs Harbor before it moved north under the Biloxi Bay Bridge. Then it swam west into Back Bay and turned east toward Fort Bayou.

“We’ve had a sighting up in West Pascagoula,’’ said Claire Pabody of the Mobile Manatee Sighting Network at Dauphin Island. “And we had the one in the inner harbor in Ocean Springs. There is no way of knowing if [the Ocean Springs Harbor] sighting was the same mammal. We never were able to get any photos.”

But local photos in the area have been taken.

Manatees seen in Bayou La Batre, Alabama, 2008.

Manatees sighted in Mobile Delta, 2009.

More info, see here.