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AS OTHER QUEENS residents were shoveling the snow off their sidewalks and going to work, 8-year-old Cisco lay back in his hammock, unbothered
by the chill in the air, feet stretched toward the sky. Nearby, Pancho explored the snowy grass
and shrubbery.
While Cisco and Pancho, who are South American spectacled bears, enjoyed the wintry morning, Raul Vasquez started his day by making sure that they spent the night without incident, examining the fence that surrounded them, and serving their breakfast.
By 9 a.m., Scott Silver was making his rounds: "Animal one to mammal one," he said into his radio as he strode through the slush. By 10 a.m., when all of the fencing had been checked and the food put out, the announcements came over the radio: two bears ready for exhibit, three bison, bobcats, four coyotes, puma, mountain lion, Roosevelt elk had all moved from their overnight pens into view. Queens' zoo was ready to open.
The Queens zoo? Overshadowed by its bigger and better known siblings in the Bronx and Central Park, the Queens Wildlife Center could be said to have a bit of an inferiority complex. But this 11- acre zoo offers something unique; in the middle of one of the most international places in the world, it is home to 40 species of all- American (North and South) birds and mammals.
But many people don't know they're there.
"I don't know how many times people have said to me, 'I've lived in Queens my whole life and I never knew Queens had a zoo,'" said Silver, curator of animals.
Originally called the Flushing Meadows Zoo, it was created by the Parks Department in 1968 on the site of the old World's Fair in Flushing Meadows- Corona Park. But the city was ill- equipped to run a zoo and in the mid- 1980s teamed with the Wildlife Conservation Society (then the New York Zoological Society), which runs the Bronx zoo. In 1988, the Flushing Meadows zoo was closed for a four-year, $16-million renovation funded by the city.
Attitudes toward zoos were changing. They had gotten a reputation as sad places where depressed, imprisoned animals paced in tiny cages. The Queens zoo was no exception. "A lot of people remember when...