Escaped owl still a thrill for eagle-eyed observers
NEW YORK — Once upon a time, there was an owl named Flaco who lived in a small zoo in the middle of a big park in America’s largest city. His story was a cliffhanger about escape and freedom and resilience.
As CNN, The Guardian and The Daily Mail joined New Yorkbased media in recounting Flaco’s adventures, concern about the owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo spread beyond his hometown. New Yorkers and tourists followed his story with a mixture of anxiety and hope — worried that after a lifetime in captivity, the owl wouldn’t know how to feed himself or keep himself safe.
Early headlines like “Central Park Zoo Owl Still on the Loose” suggested that Flaco’s escape was a variation on the plot of the animated movie “Madagascar,” in which a discontented zebra abandons the comforts of the Central Park Zoo and goes on the lam. But the latest chapter in the story of Flaco — who was born in captivity and made “his public debut” at the zoo in 2010 — began with a violent act that endangered his life.
When a vandal cut the wire mesh on his enclosure Feb. 2, the only world Flaco knew was forcibly ruptured — a trauma that could have proved fatal. From his micro-apartment (furnished only with some tree branches, fake rocks and a painted mural of a mountain landscape), Flaco the Eurasian eagle-owl was suddenly free in Central Park and exposed to all the real-life perils and thrills of Gotham.
It was a kind of existential moment for the owl: His species is native to much of Europe and Asia, but not North America, and there he suddenly was, maybe the only one of his kind in the wild on the entire continent. In his first hours and days outside the zoo, Flaco looked stressed, Karla Bloem, executive director of the International Owl Center, said. Even his flying was a little wobbly at first, she suggested. Like “someone who’s been living in their living room” for years, it took a while “to build up a little muscle and strength.”
Never before had the owl seen such wide open spaces. Never before had he been harassed by squirrels, and noisy blue jays and street-wise crows. It was amazing to watch Flaco learn, said Molly Eustis, a stage manager and owl lover, and “think ‘wow this is probably the first time in his life he’s been that high up in a tree!’ and to think how that must feel for him. Or the first time he caught a rat! Or felt the rain falling all around him.”
Despite the stereotype of owls as scholarly types, experts say they tend to be patient, practicalminded creatures of habit. Even so, owls throughout history have exerted a magnetic hold over our imaginations. Perhaps no other creature has been invested with such contradictory meanings across so many different cultures — as a protective spirit, a totem of erudition and an omen of death. In part, it’s owls’ sense of mystery, their nocturnal nature and elusiveness that account for their power to captivate. Or, as Deborah Jaffe, a birder and lifelong New Yorker, observes: “Owls have always been the hardest birds to see, which makes them the most thrilling types of birds to see.”
Many New Yorkers, especially those confined to small apartments during COVID, identified with Flaco’s story. David Barrett, who runs the popular Twitter account Manhattan Bird Alert — which many people have relied upon to track Flaco’s journey — said people who arrive in New York “need to learn new skills quickly if they want to survive, and they must adapt to an environment unlike the one from which they came.”
All these were reasons many people felt so protective of the owl: a member of a species renowned for its skills as a predator, and yet in Flaco’s case, an innocent of sorts, with no experience fending for himself. His admirers worried that he could crash into a skyscraper window, run afoul of the Central Park coyote, or get hit by a car, a fate met by Barry the Barred Owl in the summer of 2021. The biggest worry during his first days of freedom was that he wouldn’t know how to hunt and could starve to death — after all, he’d dined for a decade on deliveries of what one zoo associate described as Whole Foods-quality dead mice and rats.
But then Flaco defied everyone’s expectations. As longtime bird watcher Stella Hamilton pointed out, he was like a fledgling mastering the art of surviving, but a fledgling who compressed weeks of learning into a couple days. Despite a lifetime in captivity, the owl had somehow “remained wild inside.”
Photographer David Lei saw Flaco on his first night of freedom, looking somewhat dazed and lost near the Plaza Hotel, and he has chronicled the owl’s progress since. He watched Flaco’s first tentative hops from one tree to another. And he witnessed Flaco not only master the art of flight but also become an increasingly confident hunter.
Eurasian eagle-owls are one of the world’s largest owls. And with his nearly 6-foot wingspan, Flaco thrilled observers at fly-out every night: a feline silhouette crouched on a tree limb, suddenly soaring into the nighttime sky, like a giant pterodactyl taking wing across the park. Within a week, he was becoming the apex predator he was born to be, proudly showing off the rats he’d killed with his bare talons.