Central Park Zoo owl tastes freedom, not rushing to return
About 10: 30 Thursday morning, a halfdozen young women from Australia climbed a large rock outcropping near Central Park’s south end and began to snap pictures of one another with the skyscrapers of Billionaires’ Row as their backdrop.
Like virtually everyone passing through the area in the February chill, the women appeared unaware that nestled high in a nearby conifer was a sight perhaps even more striking than those supertall towers: a Eurasian eagle- owl named Flaco.
Flaco had left the Central Park Zoo a week earlier after his mesh enclosure was vandalized. He had thus far eluded attempts to retrieve him and seemed in no rush to return to captivity. The tree was his latest perch.
Olga Torrey, a photographer, was one of the few people paying attention to the orange- and- blackstriped bird of prey Thursday
morning, along with several zoo employees. She wondered if he would ever return to the zoo. “Once he has the taste of freedom, I’m not sure,” Torrey said.
Still, each day spent outside his familiar surroundings puts Flaco at risk. He is not used to finding food on his own. If he did make a meal of, say, a tainted rat, it could well be hazardous to his health.
Eager for Flaco’s safe return, the Wildlife Conservation Society, which operates the Central Park Zoo, has had staff members monitoring
him nearly around the clock since he was discovered missing at around 8: 30 p. m. Feb. 2.
Flaco was less than a year old when he arrived at the zoo in 2010.
As documented by birders on social media, Flaco’s week of freedom had been busy: a stop on Fifth Avenue near Bergdorf Goodman; a faceoff with a Cooper’s hawk; at least one close encounter with a squirrel; and stops across the park’s southeast corner, never far from the zoo but tantalizingly just out of reach.