Flaco is as free as a bird, for better or worse

Flaco in early June. Photo: Matt Ufford

For nine months, Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped from the Central Park Zoo, was remarkably easy to find. He favored a clearing on the northern side of the park with log piles that housed plentiful rats, and he often roosted in a nearby tree overlooking the joggers and bicyclists on East Drive. The irony was noted by frequent Flaco photographer @above_96th: After 13 years of life in an enclosure for passersby to observe, the owl had selected a spot where he could watch oblivious humans pass him by.

I found him there one day last spring, tipped off by two women under the tree staring straight up in hushed awe. I was in New York for business and had made what I considered an essential detour to see him; for all his might and splendor, his survival was no sure thing. Central Park’s previous celebrity bird, Barry the barred owl, died when she collided with a maintenance vehicle; a necropsy revealed that she had a potentially lethal dose of rodenticide in her system. I’d followed Barry’s life as closely as I could from 100 miles away during the depths of the pandemic, and I’d felt genuine loss at her death. I couldn’t miss the opportunity to see Flaco.

He was — he is — beautiful: A massive predator with blazing eyes the color of a jack-o-lantern, soft camouflage tinged with warmer colors than any large North American owl, and talons too large and sharp and powerful for an animal roaming free in a city of eight million people.

But that is exactly what he has done and especially what he is doing now: Flaco went missing from Central Park for most of last week and was spotted yesterday in the East Village, five miles from his usual haunts and farther away from Central Park than he’d been since the zoo acquired him in 2010.

David Lei, a photographer who has chronicled Flaco’s life since his escape in February, wrote:

He appeared in excellent condition and engaged in his usual pre-flyout routine before flying from his fourth-story roost to the top of a six-story building. I suspect he left Central Park to look for a mate. He might have also been in the south of the Park when the NYC Marathon fireworks show started and was flushed out, then decided to continue on.

It is true that Flaco may be looking for a mate — eagle-owls, like many species of owls, often begin courtship in late autumn — but he faces impossible odds: Flaco is almost certainly the only free Eurasian eagle-owl in the Western hemisphere. The only other eBird sightings of a wild eagle-owl in the New World are around Minneapolis, where a bird named Gladys died from an apparent collision with a car not long after after her escape from the Minnesota Zoo in 2021.

While Flaco now faces a much greater threat of that specific end, Central Park was no longer the haven it was in the spring and summer. According to Audubon, the Central Park Conservancy suspends the use of rat poison from February through August, which conveniently aligned with Flaco’s first seven months of freedom. Had he wintered over in the park, he faced the same slow accumulation of poison that was found in Barry. (Other raptors in the park face the same threat but benefit from a more varied diet. Pale Male, the red-tailed hawk who lived near the park for at least two decades, was known to target nestlings of other bird species.)

As I’ve gotten deeper into birding, one of the refrains I see from leading voices is that we shouldn’t anthropomorphize birds. But I can’t help but be saddened by the loneliness I’ve projected onto him: Of the billions of birds in the Western hemisphere representing thousands of species, Flaco is the only one of his kind living free. To find another Eurasian eagle-owl, he would have to make his way north to Greenland — across Baffin Bay or the Labrador Sea — then to Iceland, then over the North Atlantic to Scandinavia. The Eurasian eagle-owl is a non-migratory species; millions of years of evolutionary history suggests that such a flight will never happen. He is well and truly alone. He could theoretically mate with a great horned owl — the two species share the same genus, Bubo — though experts have deemed such a pairing unlikely.

But what, chimes a hopeful bell in my heart, has been likely in Flaco’s life? He lived in an enclosure the size of a bus stop for 13 years. He escaped into America’s most populous city with weak wings and no experience as a hunter. He — like millions of New York transplants before him — adapted quickly to a harsh city, tapping never-used survival instincts in an environment that doesn’t even suit most native owls. Hungry and homeless, he was cagey enough to evade a baited trap from a zoo eager to recapture him. He grew strong and lustrous on the city’s endless supply of rats, and for the first time ever he is on the precipice of what an owl is meant to be: unseen.

He is a wild thing, and he chose a life of freedom and the dangers inherent to it. His enclosure was too small and so too was Central Park, eventually. He has spread his wings — nearly six feet across — and will face the perilous world alone. I hope it is large enough for him.