Dolphins may be among the smartest mammals in the animal kingdom, but how exactly did one end up in Newtown Creek?

Location Scout: Newtown Creek.

A police boat in New York Harbor spotted the deer running along the rocky shore of Governors Island about 1:30 p.m. and sped to the rescue.

Cops shot the 10-point buck with a tranquilizer and hauled him off to a nature preserve near the southwest shore of Staten Island.

Deer aficionado David Bookstaver — who happens to be the spokesman for the state court system — said it’s not unheard of for a buck to swim that far given the current of the river and the fact it’s mating season.

Location Scout: Governors Island.

Animal control officers set a trap at Rochdale Village after a coyote or similar creature was spotted prowling around a parking lot in the sprawling south Queens cooperative housing complex.

They began emerging from the darkest corners of Van Cortlandt Park a few weeks ago: dark, V-shaped, furry blurs, barely visible against the night sky. With a few effortless flaps of their wings, the creatures buzzed over Broadway at speeds faster than any local bird.

“What the heck was that?” David Moreno, 29, asked his girlfriend when he first saw the animals gliding high above the Parade Ground. Tracking their movements, he eventually realized what he was seeing. “Hon, I think those are bats. Could there be bats in the Bronx?”

The answer, city wildlife experts say, is yes. And now is the perfect time to glimpse the rarely seen, much mythologized creatures. Little brown bats — the most common type in the city — have been making daily flights above Broadway and the Van Cortlandt Mansion throughout July, freshly rested after a season of hibernation.

Federal wildlife officials studying ways to prevent potentially fatal bird strikes, such as the one that forced a US Airways jet to make an emergency landing in the Hudson River in January, are focusing on mustard, which repels a favorite snack of birds — worms.

After it rains, earthworms crawl onto the runway at La Guardia and JFK airports, providing a smorgasbord for hungry birds, who can then get caught in plane engines, researchers said.

Port Authority workers rushed to the shell-covered runway about 8:30 a.m. and scooped up 78 diamondback terrapins that had left the waters of Jamaica Bay scouting a spot to breed, said Port Authority spokesman John Kelly.

Pilots from various airlines shared the news with stuck passengers who had to wait up to 90 minutes for their flights to take off so the turtles could land in a safe place.

Location Scout: JFK.

It’s time to kill the geese.

It’s especially time to kill those geese most likely to wreck another jet airliner, much as a gaggle of Canada geese seems to have brought down US Airways Flight 1549 Thursday.

This time, all 155 passengers and crew were lifted from the icy Hudson River — an extraordinarily exceptional outcome.

Next time? Who knows.

Canada geese are a serious threat to human life and property — not to mention a major pain to pedestrians, motorists and folks who just like to spread a picnic blanket in a park.

Obviously, the official cause of the crash won’t be declared for a while. But nobody doubts that it was what pilots call a “bird strike” — just as nobody doubts that the guilty birds were Canada geese.

That’s because Canada geese are everywhere — and they’re out of control.

. . .

Beyond airport vicinities, it’s even harder to tamper with geese (let alone kill them) — even as they coat parks and playgrounds everywhere in layers of disgusting goose poop.

This is unsightly, unsanitary — and totally unacceptable.

Something needs to be done.

Ten per cent of all trees in Manhattan are ginkgos, making it the borough’s third-most-common species. There is also the matter of its odor. Each fall, the mature female — as dioecious gymnosperms, ginkgos come in genders — produces ovules that, once fertilized, develop into bunches of seeds, each consisting of an inner kernel encased in a soft, fuzzy skin. The seeds look like green cherries and contain butyric acid, the smell of which has been variously described as “rancid butter,” “sour milk,” “sh*tberries,” and “dog crap.” The Anti-Ginkgo Tolerance Group put it this way, in a recent proposal:

We are here to solve the problem of the Ginkgo tree commonly known as vomit trees. . . . The Ginkgo tree is widely known by most people but not by name. Walking down the street on a beautiful October evening your moment of tranquility is rudely demolished by the smell of old cheese and vomit.

The members of the A.G.T.G. are few but spirited. The committee was formed in January, under the aegis of Teens Take the City, a Y.M.C.A. program designed to teach young people about local government, and one recent afternoon at the Grosvenor Neighborhood House, on the Upper West Side, its ranks numbered three: Tevin Perez, seventeen; Jackson Sansoucie, seventeen; and Daniel Maldonado, eighteen. The plan was to pass out pamphlets urging citizens to call 311 if they encountered the smelly seeds.

Perez, wearing a rumpled white button-down, khakis, and a puka-shell necklace, was the first to arrive. Seated at a table in a basement room with pocked blue walls, he and the group’s adviser, Stephen Lehtonen, said that, walking to a pizzeria one afternoon, the group had been inspired by a forty-foot ginkgo, on the front lawn of the nearby Frederick Douglass Houses, that particularly stunk. Perez likened its scent to “rotten eggs in a rare form.”

A group of pigeon-loving bird watchers wants New Yorkers to thank their feathered friends today for all the “charm” they drop on Gotham.

“National Pigeon Day” is set to be celebrated in Central Park this afternoon, with songs, prayers and speeches to honor this proud bird — not the “rats with wings” once decried by Woody Allen.

Organizers with the New York Bird Club insist that our feathered neighbors are completely misunderstood.

The pigeon proceedings get under wing 4 p.m. at Pilgrim Hill, near the park entrance at Fifth Avenue and East 72nd Street.

City Councilman Tony Avella (D-Queens) is set to be the event’s headline speaker, in a bid to strengthen his hold on the pigeon-loving electorate.

. . .

“The fact there is a National Pigeon Day shows pigeons have been of service to this country,” said Avella, and cited the pigeon’s roles in World Wars I and II as messengers.

“People have to remember that they are decent animals . . . and that they are part of the environment.”

. . .

“Pigeons give a city a wonderful flavor. They are part of the charm and they belong there,” organizers said.

“They are often a city child’s first contact with nature and an elderly person’s only friends.”

Annotation: Contrarianism is the defining feature of this decade, a scourge not easily abated, bring on the electrified subway trusses.