Adventure. Flying is my adventure, and other people have theirs. Our species climbed to the top of the planetary food chain by being adventurous; always asking why, and always moving far enough ahead to see around the next corner.

We are not alone, though. A look out my window on the hill west of Montour provides a view of everything from small birds to black bears. Every day, nature's creatures participate in their daily adventure of finding food and shelter. The competition for the next meal drives animals to strange places, and it really shouldn't have surprised me to see rabbit tracks in the snow at Newark Airport this winter.

First of all, the airport is surrounded on three sides by the "moat". Draining hundreds of acres of flatland pavement located 12 feet above sea level requires ready access to a wide drainway, and the airport is ringed west, south and east by the moat. The airport is surrounded by at least 8 lanes of traffic on all sides, and one must remember that they are New Jersey roads. Humans have been thwarted by traffic patterns in Jersey, but somehow the rabbits have succeeded in entering the airport.

Maybe the rabbits have always been there, and have managed to survive as an isolated colony amidst the daily flow of cargo and passengers at New York's busiest airport. Perhaps they would be a geneticist's dream population, their eyes, ears, and innards acclimated to life on the plain of oily winds. Who knows, these simple bunnies may be holding the secrets that our best cancer researchers have been seeking.

There aren't just a few rabbits. Last winter I observed a network of trails packed into the snow in the distant corner of the airport we park our planes. Other than shaking my head in disbelief, I didn't think much of them until last week when I had to avoid running over one of them with the airplane.

I was at the airport's epicenter of activity, between the terminal and the runway, right in front of the tower. It is where taxiways R and S split straight from the semicircular A and B and are crossed by runway 11- 29's parallel taxiways Y and W... with all of this bisected by the diagonal taxiway M. I thought it was a piece of debris blowing across in front of me in the dark, but it stopped and then reversed. Just before I passed over it (hearing no thump) I saw it was a rabbit.

I have made thousands of takeoffs and landings from grass- and- clover runways and never had to avoid a rabbit. For that experience I had to go to Newark.