Good morning. It’s Wednesday. Today we’ll find out how rabbits that were bred and born in Queens ended up in Maine and Massachusetts. We’ll also look at how Saul Zabar expanded his family’s store into an institution that’s synonymous with New York.
Somewhere in Maine — in a park across the water from New Hampshire and also in a wildlife refuge about 25 miles away — are rabbits that were bred and born in Queens.
“Bred and born” — not “born and bred” — puts the emphasis where it matters, because the point of this story is that they had to be bred. Zoologists say that not all rabbits reproduce prolifically despite the cliché “breed like rabbits.” There are vulnerable species that are not considered endangered but that could die out if they do not have some help with what zoologists politely call courtship.
The New England cottontail is one such species.
The help has come from the Queens Zoo, in a combination of “Let’s Make a Deal,” “The Dating Game” and “The Bachelor” or “The Bachelorette” that is unlikely to end up in prime time. There are video cameras in the zoo’s breeding area, which has different doorways that a female rabbit can decide to go through — and a male rabbit waiting on the other side of each.
But the cameras almost never catch the rabbit-world equivalent of the extended make-out sessions that reality television lives for. Donna-Mae Butcher, the assistant curator of animals at the Queens Zoo, said that the rabbits “move so quickly, it’s like a flash.” Often the best indication that something happened is morning-after evidence — tufts of hair on the floor, she said.
New England cottontails may have hopped across the five boroughs in the past, but they moved on as the city grew and spread out and the remaining forests and farmland were cleared away. Their numbers dwindled throughout the Northeast: The zoo says the New England cottontail population has shrunk by more than 80 percent since the 1960s. The New York State Department of Environmental Conservation puts their status in a category of “special concern,” while New Hampshire and Maine list them as endangered. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service considered listing them under the federal Endangered Species Act in the early 2000s but decided not to.
Who’s who
One problem for the Queens Zoo is making sure it is breeding the right rabbits, because the New England cottontail looks somewhat like the Eastern cottontail. “You really have to have a sharp eye,” Butcher said. “The Eastern, their ears are longer and narrower. That’s why we always do a DNA test to make sure it is a true New England cottontail.”
The Eastern cottontail was brought to the Northeast from Missouri in the 1930s “primarily to benefit hunters when the native cottontail populations began to decline,” according to the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, R.I., which began the rabbit repopulation program that the Queens Zoo joined nine years ago.
Since then, the zoo has bred 145 New England cottontails. This summer, 15 youngsters were bred at the Queens Zoo and sent to Maine and Massachusetts after little or no interaction with people, the better to ensure that they would take to the wild when they were released.
There is a protocol for the zoo’s staff when there is a pregnancy: no talking. “You turn your radios down,” Butcher said. The rabbits “are used to normal forest sounds, and we’ve brought them into Queens. They’re used to noises, but not these noises. You have to be conscious how loud you’re speaking and to not drop a rake on the floor. It sends these little things into a panic.”
Weather
Expect a chance of showers and thunderstorms with temperatures near 70 during the day and clear skies tonight, with temperatures in the high 40s.
ALTERNATE-SIDE PARKING
Suspended today for Sukkot.
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Remembering a Zabar
Zabar’s always had a little of the old Upper West Side.
Saul Zabar, who died on Tuesday at 97, kept it that way, even as he remade it from what it had been — a string of shops along Broadway selling the same traditional items — to something more. “They were always known for the smoked salmon and the whitefish and the kippers — that was where it all came from,” my colleague Pete Wells said when we talked about Zabar and Zabar’s on Tuesday.
But Zabar expanded what was behind the counters and on the shelves. “He brought Zabar’s into the world of fancy foods from everywhere, not just from Eastern Europe,” Pete said. “It was, ‘There’s cheese from Italy, and there’s fabulous coffee that we got in Africa.’ He found a way to expand into things that didn’t come from Eastern Europe but kept the fish.”
Or, as the writer Nora Ephron put it, Zabar’s became “the most rambunctious and chaotic of all delicatessens, with one foot in the Old World and the other in the vanguard of every fast-breaking food move in the city.”
His timing was perfect, because there was an audience for the food revolution that was building. But Zabar’s remained an Upper West Side institution. Ephron, who died in 2012, loved Zabar’s so much she dreamed of being a Zabar. She wrote that it is “messy and middle-class; it gives the impression of disorganization without being disorganized; it gives the appearance of warmth without being truly friendly.” Zabar’s is a place where the shopping feels competitive: People elbow their way past each other with a particular urgency. Newbies learn to stay out of the way.
And then there was Saul Zabar himself: “Not superfriendly, but warm in his own way,” said Gale Brewer, who represents the Upper West Side on the City Council.
That’s what I remember from when I talked to him about the lobster salad, after a Louisianian noticed something we New Yorkers had not: It contained no lobster. The essential ingredient was crawfish.
Zabar went to Wikipedia and read a line that said crawfish belonged to one of the superfamilies that are “freshwater crustaceans resembling small lobsters.” By that definition, he said, there was no reason not to call the lobster salad just that.
But he changed the name to “seafare salad,” only to have people point out that crawfish aren’t seafarers, so he changed it again, to “Zabster Zalad” — “the first word a portmanteau of Zabar’s and lobster, the second tossed in for fun,” as Clyde Haberman explained in Zabar’s obituary.
Brewer said she remembers seeing Zabar “moving the carts around to put them in the right place and putting the products in the right locations.” He was doing that when he was 95, she said, “and before that, he was behind the counter with the salmon and the fish and the good things.”
“He wasn’t like ‘I’m a Zabar,’ he was just the guy behind the counter,” Brewer said.
METROPOLITAN diary
Passing the baton
Dear Diary:
I was walking up Eighth Avenue near Port Authority when a bicycle delivery person rode past me in the bike lane. A folded paper dropped from his pocket.
“Wait,” I shouted, but he was too far away to hear.
I unfolded the paper. It had five delivery stops for that morning.
As I contemplated what to do next, I heard a voice behind me: “Over here.”
Looking over my shoulder, I saw another bicycle delivery person slowing down and extending his hand.
I jogged alongside him and, as if passing a baton in a relay race, handed off the paper.
He grinned, lowered his head and sped off after the first bicyclist, who was barely visible in the distance. I just knew he would catch up with him.
— David Boccio
Illustrated by Agnes Lee. Tell us your New York story here and read more Metropolitan Diary here.
Glad we could get together here. See you tomorrow. — J.B.
P.S. Here’s today’s Mini Crossword and Spelling Bee. You can find all our puzzles here.
Francis Mateo, Lauren Hard and Ed Shanahan contributed to New York Today. You can reach the team at [email protected].
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James Barron writes the New York Today newsletter, a morning roundup of what’s happening in the city.
The post How the Queens Zoo Is Helping to Save a New England Rabbit appeared first on New York Times.
