Rabbit

In 1624, so the story goes, a party of Dutch emigrants to America, struggling ashore after months of eating rancid corned beef, were so delighted to find the inhospitable peninsular of land south of today’s Brooklyn inhabited by rabbits, that they promptly christened it Konijn Eiland. The conies that provided them with their first fresh food looked almost exactly the same as the grizzle-gray rabbits found in Holland, but were very different. These were indigenous Cottontail rabbits (Sylvilganus Floridanus), found throughout the United States to parts of southern Canada, and are today North America’s most abundant ground game species.