Eurasian eagle-owl named Flaco dies
NEW YORK — Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from New York City’s Central Park Zoo and became one of the city’s most beloved celebrities as he flew around Manhattan, has died, zoo officials announced Friday.
A little over a year after he was freed from his cage at the zoo in a criminal act that has yet to be solved, Flaco appears to have collided with an Upper West Side building, the zoo said in a statement.
“The vandal who damaged Flaco’s exhibit jeopardized the safety of the bird and is ultimately responsible for his death,” the statement said. “We are still hopeful that the NYPD, which is investigating the vandalism, will ultimately make an arrest.”
Staff from the Wild Bird Fund, a wildlife rehabilitation center, responded to the scene and declared Flaco dead shortly after the collision. He was taken to the Bronx Zoo for a necropsy.
“We hoped only to see Flaco hooting wildly from the top of our local water tower, never in the clinic,” the World Bird Fund wrote in a post on X, formerly known as Twitter.
Flaco’s time in the sky began Feb. 2, 2023, when someone breached a waist-high fence and slipped into the Central Park Zoo. Once inside, they cut a hole through a steel mesh cage, freeing the owl that had arrived at the zoo as a fledgling 13 years earlier.
Since the zoo suspended efforts to re-capture Flaco in February 2023, there has been no public information about the crime.
Until now, Flaco had defied the odds, thriving in the urban jungle despite a lifetime in captivity.
His death prompted an outpouring of grief on social media Friday night.