^rxf^''^v^^':'!^''?-'''^~ 



The Lake Placid area in northern New York. This is a land 

 of numerous lakes, left mostly by the bulldozing action of 

 the last great icecap. 



and the wonderful changes that have followed its "retreat." It 

 is for this reason also that the northern areas of the province 

 have such a strangely agglomerate fauna. As you roam about this 

 country today the wildlife is more notable for its profusion than 

 its variety — at least at first sight. There is said to be more game 

 per acre in Pennsylvania than in any other state in the union, 

 and despite Appalachia's almost fungoid growth of farmland, 

 industry, and towns with their sprawling suburbs, there is no 

 doubt that some mammals and many birds and amphibians 

 appear to thrive in the new conditions. Deer swarm literally 

 everywhere, even wandering into suburban areas. On a main 

 highway not more than twenty miles from New York City, I 

 once witnessed a game warden count 127 head in one herd 

 grazing peaceably by the roadside while cars roared by. 



There are raccoons that beg for scraps on a restaurant veranda 

 overlooking Manhattan, and the police in Harlem have orders 

 to eliminate both raccoons and opossums that occasionally turn 

 over trash cans in the city streets. A pair of red foxes were found 

 breeding in Central Park, there are wild mink in Van Cortlandt 



Park, owls were discovered in the towers of the American 

 Museum of Natural History, and peregrine falcons have nested 

 on more than one famous midtowm New York hotel and have 

 molested the pigeons in Wall Street. 



Wherever you drive in Appaladiia you will see fat ground- 

 hogs chumbling away on grass stems at the very edge of the 

 blacktop roads, skunks wandering blissfully about, and cottontail 

 rabbits bounding in and out of hedgerows. Cats bring moles and 

 shrews to your doorstep on Long Island, and there are gray 

 squirrels everywhere, and chipmunks toting nuts around many 

 houses. I have taken a nest of flying squirrels out of a restaurant 

 within greater New York, and a weasel out of a drainpipe in 

 Brooklyn. There is a group of youths in that same borough 

 that collects snakes and destroys thousands of black widow 

 spiders in vacant lots. Even more bizarre, full-grovwi finner 

 whales are beached within city limits, a harbor porpoise got 

 stuck in a sewer in the Bronx, and a brook trout was found 

 swimming in a midtown gutter flooded by a broken water main. 



And then there are the birds. They are everywhere. Sea gulls 

 bring bits of dry bread to be softened in city fountains, crows 

 turn up to eat food put out for pigeons, and thousands of migra- 

 tory birds have slammed into the Empire State Building. Moving 

 only a little way out of the city, you will find wild ducks breeding 

 on the marshes, hawks on the cliffs, and all manner of perching 



102 



