Results tagged “centralparkzoo”

Who can't use a little cute animal "news" on a Monday? Prospect Park Zoo recently introduced "a trio of new yellow footed rock wallabies in the Australian Walkabout on Discovery Trail," and they sent us this photo of one of them with a pumpkin! Since the WCS loves giving its animals pumpkin treats around Halloween, even the snow leopard had some fun with one at Central Park Zoo recently:

Some public school kids were treated to the first look at Central Park Zoo's new snow leopards yesterday, the first of their kind to have a Manhattan zip code. Some of the kids talked to the Daily News, giving their initial thoughts on the uncertain future of the animals as a species. One 8-year-old named Conway told them, "I'm inspired. In the winter, I will spend all the time helping endangered animals by not wasting paper, and I will try not to litter, which I already do." What about the other three seasons Conway?

       

Just in time for summer: the snow leopards are here! Coming straight from the Bronx, the big cats have been getting some spotlight regarding their move to the Central Park Zoo, who will open their new Allison Maher Stern Snow Leopard Exhibit tomorrow.

To be a young harbor seal taking some time from swimming to sun! A young seal was seen hanging out at the 79th Street Boast Basin yesterday morning the Parks Department.

As you shivered your way to work, you can at least be reassured that yesterday was the coldest August day since 1911 (when subways cost a nickel!). Yesterday's high was 59 degrees, taking the mantle of coldest August 21 ever.

A bit of heat today and tomorrow, showers late Tuesday and early Wednesday, and very pleasant weather to welcome the summer solstice on Thursday are this week's weather highlights. Today and tomorrow's weather is being brought to us by a weak high pressure system. High pressure systems aren't usually associated with exciting weather so Gothamist has to dig into the subtleties.

If you're cooped up in a stuffy apartment this muggy afternoon, consider visiting one of New York's many zoos. The cool customers pictured above are residents of the Central Park Zoo. There's also the Bronx Zoo and New York Aquarium at Coney Island. If you can't make it to any of those, you can always settle for the Penguin Cam.

An 18-year-old student who attends either a high school or college, depending on which paper you're reading, was stabbed yesterday morning on Manhattan's East Side. The motive for the attack is uncertain, but people are willing to speculate. In the Daily News (identifying the victim, Alton McCarthy, as a college freshman), McCarthy's mother paints a picture of her son cutting through Central Park to catch a train home, when he is set upon by a gang of Bloods, who stab him repeatedly in a vicious initiation ritual. She bemoans the fact that no one came to her son's rescue in the crowded daytime park.

What's a polar bear to do when it is 72 in January? Well, if you're a member of the Coney Island Polar Bear Club, you stage a silent protest. The Times reports eight members of the club cancelled their Saturday swim, because the water was too warm. Perhaps more interestingly, the News reports it was nine members of the club and the Post says ten! According to Polar Bear Club treasurer Tom McGann, yesterday was the first time in more than a century that the club has cancelled a swim. Meanwhile, the News also reports that the real polar bears in the Central Park Zoo were largely unaffected by the warm weather.

Even though Central Park's famous gay penguin couple Silo and Roy broke up (Silo, the Anne Heche of the penguin world, took to a lady penguin named Scrappy), they were immortalized in the adorable children's book, And Tango Makes Three. And Tango Makes Three recounts how Silo and Roy were given a fertilized egg to hatch, after they unsuccessfully tried to hatch a rock - and baby girl Tango was born.

Today, a drunken man visiting the Beijing Zoo climbed into the panda habitat - and there was also "hugging" and biting. Reports say that 35 year old Zhang Xinyan had drunk "four draught beers" before heading to the zoo, where he was suddenly overcome with a desire to touch Gu Gu, a 6 year old male panda. Gu Gu freaked out and bit Zhang's, so then Zhang bit back. Zookeepers managed to get Gu Gu off Zhang by using a hose, and Zhang was taken to a hospital for stitches on his leg. The AP reports:

The Beijing Youth Daily quoted Zhang as saying that he had seen pandas on television and "they seemed to get along well with people."

Continue reading "Pandas Do Get Cranky When You Sneak Up on Them"

More Central Park Zoo events can be found here.

Just because we are fans of Gus, the formerly depressed polar bear at the Central Park Zoo, we want to bring your attention to the Times story of how the zoo's polar bears were keeping cool in the heat. Unlike humans, they do not get upset when the subway's power is out or when the thunder and lighting prevent them from watching TV (thanks, satellites!). Instead, Gus and Ida cope with not living in their natural habitat by swimming, hanging out in air-conditioned areas and enjoying frozen treats ("ice pops with chunks of frozen salmon"). But much like humans, they LOVE whipped cream. It seems that there will be a cook-off between Rachael Ray and a zoo keeper to see who can prepare a better meal fit for a polar bear (think "Ursus Chef"), and the ingredients on hand include whipped cream and tilapia. But that doesn't mean you should bring Reddi-Wip with you the next time you're at the zoo.

- This weekend the Central Park Zoo, which just got a new curator, had its 15 millionth visitor!

Uhm, really? According to Police Chief Michael Collins "officers took prudent steps to handle what may have been a dangerous situation" on Thursday when eight officers jumped and arrested a balloon artist as he pulled his bike up to his normal place of business outside of the Central Park Zoo. His crime? Leaving an $850 rainbow striped electric air pump behind in a Starbucks. The cops said it looked like a bomb.

The oldest known female sea lion in captivity, Breezy the Sea Lion, was quietly euthanized yesterday.

Tomorrow is Earth Day, and there are a number of events in the city. Many are occuring at Grand Central Terminal, where there are exhibits, demonstrations, and musical perfomances with exhibitors like the Audobon Society, Google Earth and Recycle a Bicycle - check out Earth Day NY 2006. There's an Earth Awareness Festival tomorrow on Waverly Place, the events the Parks Department is organizing, and we are very partial to the events occuring at zoos around the city - activities and you can drop off your old cellphones at the Central Park, Bronx, Prospect Park, and Queens Zoos (plus the NY Aquarium).

Not only are seals coming back to the harbor but they are coming to the Zoo, too. The Post has a story on the one of the newest additions to the Central Park Zoo, a one-year-old half-blind harbor seal named Herbie. Maybe this story is running now to keep people's mind off of the wild animals in the area?Anyway

The year-old pup was found stranded on a dock in Maine last year, partly blind and skinny because he couldn't see well enough to catch his dinner.

Continue reading "Hark, Herbie the Half-Blind Harbor Seal Has Arrived!"

- And we'll see some of you tonight at Fornino for our pizza party with Slice - bring your appetite!

Sunny skies and temperatures above fifty will do a quick number on the snow. The sidewalks will a gloppy, sloppy mess for a few days. If there's any snow mounds left by the weekend they are going to freeze hard. A relatively dry cold front looks like it will move through on Friday. The front will bring high winds and cold air. Saturday and Sunday will be chilly. The cold spell will only last a few days. Normally this would be the time of year when Gothamist starts getting spring fever. With our almost total lack of winter weather this year we are confused. We still want more snow, but at the same time we are pleased to see bylines from places like Port St. Lucie and Tampa as pitchers and catchers begin reporting to spring training.

Yesterday was the city's first weekday dealing with the "Blizzard of 2006," and it actually wasn't that bad, with snow starting to melt and people not complaining as much as they could about snow removal. The usual rule of thumb in determining how much a snow storm's cleanup cost is $1 million per inch of snow, but Mayor Bloomberg said he doubt the clean-up would cost $26.9 million. Forget clean-up, how about fixing potholes and those huge holes at street corners? Gothamist's favorite game during these days is "Do You Know How Deep That Slush-Topped Puddle Is?" when you gingerly tap a puddle to see if it's a manageable 1-2 inches deep or a monstrous 5+ inches deep, which requires waterproof boots and making you've plotted a route out (the alternate title is "How To Cross The Street By Stepping Into As Few Puddles As Possible"). Besides worrying about slushy sidewalks, officials are worried about flooding...and possibly drunken snow plowers. But we learned something very interesting from the NY Times article about how this storm's aftermath was surprisingly normal:

One more thing. Not to cast doubt on a record — or on the hard-working people who keep it — but do you know who measures the snow at Central Park? The security guards at the zoo. They read the numbers off a stick set in a flat, tree-ringed clearing near the sea lion pool.

Continue reading "The More You Snow"

With Halloween in three days, our attention must be turned to those who cannot speak about their costumes: The animals. Tomorrow, at Fort Greene Park, dog owners will converge with their canines in awesome outfits for the Great PUPkin. But what about kitty cats? The Post's Julia Szabo put up this photograph of her cat Huey in a festive costume from Posh Paws on the Upper East Side, but we suspect Huey was given a kilo of catnip, because we've had very little success in convincing the cats we know to wear outfits (except for this U. Michigan fan). We can't help but think back to Robert DeNiro's words from Meet the Parents, when he implies that cats are more intelligent than dogs: Maybe dogs are a glutton for our punishment, but they look so damned cute when they happen to wear balloons in order to look like a bunch of grapes. Maybe cats are silently protesting any costumes because the selection of outfits is so limited.

While we're on the topic of trains, check out this great gallery of art from 148 subway stations. Be sure to click through on the art project title-- there are subpages for each with a ton of images. Our favorite gallery is of the Urban Oasis mosaics at the 5th Avenue stop on the N/R-- created by Ann Schaumburger, they celebrate the animals at the nearby Central Park Zoo.

On Wednesday, the polar bear Gus and Ida at the Central Park Zoo held a press conference, with some help from the Natural Resources Defense Council. The point was to announce that the Center for Biological Diversity and Greenpeace would take legal action against the government for further endangering the already-endangered polar bears: Global warming is leading to polar bears' natural habitats to melt out. And the press conference's location was to drive home the fact that zoos may be the only place where you can see polar bears if things keep going as they have. We love the idea that polar bears would hold a press conference, concerned about their wild relatives, and in fact, we hope the NRDC can get the penguins to give a press conference next.

Double-decker tour buses have in the past decade become a standard part of the average tourist's trip to the Big Apple. You see them everywhere in Manhattan and in the past few years they've even made it out to the wilds of Brooklyn. Sometimes when you're standing on a corner you can catch a snippet of the what a tour guide is telling their innocent charges, but other than that the average New Yorker has little to no idea what is actually getting said about our fair city to our thousands of visitors. So it was interesting for us to see in the today's Daily News an exposé on the validity of the average double-decker bus tour.

And now for your "Saturday Afternoon Gothamist Animal Update":

Wi-Fi Salon is installing Wi-Fi into 10 city parks over the next few months. Central Park will have eight hot spots (including the zoo, Delacorte Theater, and Boathouse), as will Orchard Beach, Flushing Meadows, Van Cortlandt, Pelham Bay, Prospect, Riverside, Union Square, and Washington Square Parks. The Daily News says that Battery Park's hotspot, near Battery Gardens, is already running and that Wi-Fi Salon is paying the Parks Department for the right to install the network, hoping to encourage people to join its IP phone service. Whatever the reason, Gothamist can only say hurrah, because if there's one blogging goal we have, it's to live-blog monkeys throwing poo at us from the Central Park Zoo.

. Gothamist must admit that we could not resist judging this book by its cover, seeing as we were instantly smitten. But it only got better when we looked inside. This is the true story of Roy and Silo, two male chinstrap penguins at the Central Park Zoo who, when all the other penguins paired off boy-girl boy-girl, fell in love with each other instead. Uninterested in females but obviously family types, Roy and Silo tended an egg-shaped stone until a zookeeper entrusted them with an egg. Sure enough, the nurturing pair took care of their egg until baby Tango hatched, and they raised her as their own. The world’s first documented alternative penguin family can still be visited at the Central Park Zoo. If that doesn't make you proud to be a New Yorker, we don't know what will. Gothamist has already urged you to go see the penguins; won't you stop by?

Gothamist loved The March of the Penguins (the drama! the weather! the adorable baby penguins!) so much that we decided we had to see some penguins, since this town may never give us the pandas we deserve. And the NY Post had the same idea, dispatching a reporter to visit the penguins of Coney Island. Reporter Michael Kane had a Costeau-y narration ("In an isolated and untamed Atlantic outpost separated from civilization by a chain-link fence and reachable by a perilous trek on foot, automobile, skateboard, pogo stick or any of four MTA subway lines...") as well as the thoughts from a group of visitors to the New York Aquarium:

"Do something!" shouts an onlooker, as the birds stand motionless on their rock ledge. One of the full-grown 2-footers eventually waddles over to the edge and stares down at the water - for 15 minutes.

Continue reading "Penguins in New York"

Now, the NY Times had a feature about how the new Dreamworks animated film, Madagascar, went to great lengths accurately recreate New York City, such as looking at blueprints of Grand Central Terminal. And Gothamist does think those scenes look amazing - as well as how the animators depicted the Central Park Zoo. But one thing Gothamist feels we need to point out about the film, which is about the Central Park Zoo's zebra, lion, giraffe, and hippotamus getting involved in various wacky antics in the city, and then ending up shipped to Madagascar, is that the Central Park Zoo, as wonderful as it is, doesn't actually have a zebra, lion, giraffe or hippo on its property.