Could a Baby Cow be Roaming Pleasantville?

As part of our collaboration with Pace University’s journalism department, The Examiner News features student-reported stories like this one.

By James Steigerwald

Pleasantville has lots of wildlife, from deer, to hawks, to groundhogs, and especially those turkeys who love to cross the road at the most inopportune times. But when you think of Pleasantville wildlife, a cow will most likely not be at the top of your list – until now. Pleasantville resident Noelle Nicolai saw what she believed to be a baby cow on Broadway on Jan. 17.

Nicolai said her family had been on their way to meet friends for dinner in Tarrytown, when she saw a mail truck stopped on the road with around 15 cars lined up behind it.

“We look, and along the fence line running from the [Pleasantville] Cottage School towards Lake Street is a white small animal, with [brown] spots all over it, with its head down, hauling ass to the stoplight,” she said.

Nicolai called the Pleasantville Police Department about it.

“We received the report, but the two officers who responded and canvassed the area did not find anything,” Police Chief Erik Grutzner said in an email.

Nicolai also called friends who had been on Broadway around the same time. Nicolai said they saw several cars that had pulled over, but no cow.

Nicolai figured someone had to have seen it, so she turned to 10570 411, a local Facebook group.

But one person wrote she might have seen the same cow coming down Bear Ridge Road.

“So she’s coming down Bear Ridge into town, into the old village, and she sees three deer on the side of the road and they run in front of her, and she was like, ‘that last one was not a deer,’” Nicolai paraphrased. “It was white with tan spots, did not look like a deer, but I can’t imagine it was a cow.”

A couple other people replied to say that they had also seen an animal similar to that description. But could it have been a cow?

Jacob Reiter is the manager of the Dyson College Nature Center on Pace University’s Pleasantville campus, and an expert on local wildlife.

“There’s really no animals, in New York State, wild animals, that get mistaken for cows,” Reiter said. “What it could be that vaguely resembles cows in size would be a white tailed deer.”

He said the animal Nicolai and others saw could have been a leucistic white-tailed deer, which lack pigmentation and thus can appear white. But he thought that was unlikely.

“Whenever I hear of domestic animals or farm animals running around, my first thought is that it’s an escapee from a farm,” Reiter said. “I’ve been out and seen huge groups of ducks and geese, and then I’ve seen a domestic goose mixed in there with them. And it probably just means that there’s a farm somewhere where that domestic goose got out of and joined this flock of wild geese.”

And when people in the Pleasantville area think of farms, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture often comes to mind. The renowned farm, education center, and partner restaurant is located in Pocantico Hills, not that close to Broadway. But would it be too far for a determined cow on the run?

Fueling speculation about the cow was the fact that a fire had occurred at Stone Barns January 11, just a few days before the spectacle Nicolai saw on Broadway.

“Stone Barns, on the Rockefeller Preserve, has pigs, cows, sheep, chickens, and goats,” Nicolai said. “They keep all of that there for the restaurant. Is it possible that in the chaos of a fire, or whatever structures were damaged, that a baby cow got out?”

However, the fire was contained quickly and caused only minor damage. And Stone Barns spokesperson Anya Abrams provided this response to our emailed inquiry:

“All of our cows are accounted for and our pastures are not adjacent to Pleasantville. It’s highly unlikely that a cow could travel from the Rockefeller Preserve to Pleasantville due to the distance and major roads involved.”

So the mystery continues. Was it a cow? If so, where did it come from? Where was it going? Will it open a rival coffee shop?

Stay tuned.