Flaco: A Triptych ~ Part 1: The Escape

From up above, Flaco the Eurasian eagle-owl hooted down on New York City.
 

“This is the last place I saw him,” David Barrett is saying.

David and I have just made our way through the Shakespeare Garden and over to the west side of Central Park. We emerged around 81st Street and headed north, passing buildings like the famous Beresford on 211 Central Park West with its massive octagonal towers.

A light rain is falling.

For the last year David has been one of the central players in the drama of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo on February 2, 2023. Almost immediately the escapee garnered a human following, and very quickly a tribe of Flaco followers emerged. If those followers had a high priest it was David, whose X account, Manhattan Bird Alert, helped others follow the bird both in the park and on their screens.

As we made our way up the west side of the park David gave me a tour of Flaco’s favorite haunts, like the beautiful art deco building at 241 Central Park West, where he tells me, “Flaco perched a number of times.”

During his final days Flaco spent much of his time in hidden courtyards on the Upper West Side, supplementing his rat diet by occasionally feasting on rooftop pigeons at night. Both, it turned out, helped kill him.

From November 19th to the time of his death this was his turf and his hooting echoed down to the streets and through the canyons between the buildings at night.

Now we walk a little further west and he points up at a water tower that Flaco favored. I stare up through the scratchy hands of a honey locust that grows out of a dirt patch on the sidewalk of 86th. The water tower sits atop a 20-story building like an ill-fitting chapeau. Its white paint is chipped off in places that look yellow-orange. An iron ladder climbs up its side and David describes how Flaco liked to rest on top of that ladder. In fact he had a great fondness for water towers, perhaps because they, like him, perched above everything else, and because they reflected his hoots, making them seem louder to him. From up above he hooted down on the city.

I have never really noticed water towers in New York before. After today I will see them everywhere. The great ancient-looking tubs, archaic-seeming, carbuncles from another century topping off modern buildings. Perfect owl perches.

David, who lives on the Upper East Side close to the park, first heard about the owl when it landed on Fifth Avenue the night of its escape, February 2, 2023, his X followers reporting it to him, “as early as 8:30 or 9:00.” A follower initially reported that the owl was a great horned but once he was sent a photo he quickly realized it was a Eurasian eagle-owl, a non-native bird, and that it probably came from the Central Park Zoo, only three blocks away. By early the next morning David, armed with his camera and binoculars, had made his way to the Hallett Sanctuary along the park’s southern border, and soon had the owl in his sights. By then the news was out, confirming that the owl’s name was Flaco and he had indeed escaped from the zoo. Over the next few days he watched Flaco, conducted interviews with those who had seen him on the first night, discovered that he had been right about Flaco being a zoo escapee, and posted up a storm. Things were happening fast. “He became the world’s most famous bird in a matter of days,” David says. What he doesn’t say is that at the same time he was becoming the world’s most famous bird follower.  

A couple days before, I conducted a long phone interview with David, during which he shared many details of Flaco’s year of freedom. Over the phone I noted he had a very precise, almost clipped way of talking, and I suspected he was not born in the United States. But when I asked him about his origins, he said his speech was the result of being trained as an opera singer and then studying classical speech.    

David has been generous with his time and his knowledge, and it is very clear how much Flaco meant to him. But in what I am coming to see in his careful, precise way, he does not approach that emotion directly. 

“He wasn’t ever heard hooting in his enclosure back in the zoo,” David says as we head back to the park. “Probably because he had no reason to hoot. Owls like to hoot from prominent spots where they can be seen and heard. After he had been free for half a year he was heard hooting from high points, atop water towers and buildings, all over New York. Residents grew used to the hoots and were sad when they were gone.” 

As he speaks, I try to understand his loss. On a practical level his lifestyle has changed. For almost a full year he lived as a crepuscular and night hunter. He had always been a—dare I say it—night owl, but with the introduction of Flaco into his life that became more pronounced. Owls are mostly inactive during the sunlight hours so their workday really starts at fly-out, the name for the moment when they, after a day of roosting and resting, launch themselves into the night. But large owls, and Eurasian eagle-owls are among the very largest, like to hunt at dawn and dusk, not needing the secrecy of dark and surprise that smaller owls rely on. For the last 12 months David has had his own version of fly-out, pushing off from his apartment an hour or two before sunset, armed with binoculars and camera, into the park. 

David Barrett is, in his own way, passionate, but as befits a man who studied math at Harvard and MIT,  he is also a rational creature of plans, of lists, of goals. Thin and fit, he dresses neatly and today he wears a windbreaker and the fingerless gloves of a biker. His passion is contained in those fully articulated vowels and clipped consonants, but it isn’t hard to see that there is love in his voice when he talks about the owl. There is no other word for it.

The most poignant thing I will hear from David during my visit will not come directly from him but from the playwright Nan Knighton. Knighton was not aware of the Flaco story, when, on November 14th, the owl suddenly showed up outside the kitchen window of her 13th-floor Fifth Avenue apartment window. For three hours the owl stayed at her window, an event she would list as one of the most exciting in her life. After this visitation, Nan became a passionate Flaco follower, and kept in almost daily contact with David, mostly by text.

When I met with Nan in her living room overlooking the reservoir in Central Park, she told me of her deep fondness for David but also admitted that he is a bit of a mystery to her. After Flaco had been dead for a week, David made what amounted to, by his standards, an emotional confession.

Here is what he said:

“I don’t know what to do with my nights.”

I am tired and wet when David and I say goodbye, but my day is still just beginning. I cut east across the park. My destination now is the Central Park Zoo, and not only for the restrooms.  I want to see Flaco’s former home, the place he left behind.

Perhaps it is the rain, or David’s sadness, or just the general loss, but I find the zoo depressing. Watching my daughter delight in the penguins and sea lions more than a decade ago it was a different place. But all is context. At this point the dire necropsy report has not cast its shadow over Flaco’s year. The owl has me thinking about freedom and captivity, and so my glimpse of the white flanks of the snow leopard as it passes the glass window does nothing to lift my spirits. The past summer I felt an electric tingle seeing wild grizzlies in Montana and Canada, but the encaged griz slumping on a rock does nothing for me. I remain glum despite the wild avian variety of the tropics exhibit. If I had seen the green peafowl or the plush-crested jay or the golden-crested myna bird in the wild, let alone glimpsed a snow leopard or grizzly from so close, I would have been wildly excited (and afraid). Here I shrug. Everything really is context.

At first I can’t find Flaco’s enclosure and I wonder if it has been dismantled. Over by the back of the grizzly’s cage I see what I assume is a maintenance man carrying a ladder. I will give no more details about the man since he will turn out to be the closest I will come to a Deep Throat in my zoo investigation. Staying true to what Philip Roth called the “unseemly profession” of being a writer, I feign ignorance and say “I heard there was a famous owl who lived here. Do you know where they kept him?”

He says he does and leads me over to the enclosure which is tucked in near the exit to the penguin and seabird exhibit. I say I heard that the vandals who freed the bird had used bolt cutters to cut the mesh, but he corrects me.

“No, the mesh was steel. They had to use a grinder, a professional tool.”

He shows me the enclosure, the mesh completely removed now. He spreads his arms.

“This bird was big, huge, and this was its place,” he says.

I am startled by how small the enclosure is. In the notes I took while studying online pictures of it, I had said it was about the size of a racquetball court, but it is nowhere close. Barely 20 feet across, it looks like a diorama at a natural history museum. Except it held a live bird.

Now, unprompted, my source speculates about the night of the crime. He suggests it was an inside job.

“They had to know this place. It was somebody who knew the zoo because there was a camera right there.”

He points a few feet behind us. 

“You step there and you’re on camera. They knew to cut the fence in back and come around out of view of the cameras.”

I study the space that was Flaco’s home for 13 years. Three dead trees that my not-always-reliable phone app identifies as an Indian almond, bagpod, and common fig served as his perches. An illustration covers the back of the cage, a misty painting of foggy mountains and steppes with a river running through it—Flaco’s preferred habitat, put there, if you were in a certain dark mindset, almost to taunt him.

The steel mesh is gone, the former cage now completely open.

I ask my source about this and he says, “They left it open all year just in case the owl wanted to come back.”

As it turned out, he did not.

There are many reasons that the year-long odyssey of Flaco the owl captured the imaginations not just of New Yorkers but of millions of people around the globe. The formerly caged bird learning street smarts, surviving the mean streets by eating rats. The immigrant coming from elsewhere to make it in the big city. The island of green in an urban sea that is Central Park, the bird’s new home territory. The appeal of freedom, of something formerly caged breaking out. And the idea that Flaco, like so many of us after the extended house arrest of Covid, was getting outside and seeing the world. Even the grim necropsy, revealing Flaco had suffered from a viral infection from eating pigeons and had four different rodenticides in his system, serves as a Rachel Carsonesque warning about what we have done to our urban birds.

Over the 12 months between his escape and his death, Flaco authored a story whose moral, and even its basic narrative arc, is still uncertain and varied, dependent very much on who you talk to or what posts you read. The poor owl carried so much symbolic weight that it was a miracle he could fly. Freedom was the first word on many lips, but human beings, being human, found much to disagree on when it came to the owl. The internet, being the internet, amplified those disagreements. The narrative began with the bird’s escape and the zoo’s attempts to recapture him, and with the quickly growing deep and heartfelt resistance to those attempts (and the predictable scolding of those protestors). Once the early predictions that Flaco would not be able to hunt in the (relative) wilds of Central Park were proved wrong, the narrative began to change. A growing contingent of Free-Flaco followers signed petitions and their comments flooded the internet. Ornithologists weighed in, some claiming that the non-native bird would be a danger to native ones, the beginning of the theme of Flaco as immigrant, trying to make it in a foreign city. But the experts also rightly worried for Flaco, his ability to survive in the wild, the poisons he might be ingesting once he started hunting successfully, setting up the central conflict of the narrative that would grow over the next year: safety versus freedom.

It is hard, but let’s try to go back to the beginning. That is, let’s try to break through all the various meanings we have pinned to the bird and really see it, not stories about it. See the bird before the stories begin. Look into its orange eyes, the color of a monarch butterfly’s wings, blazing eyes that stare right back into yours. Cartoon eyes but deadly serious. Great black pupils. Human eyes you might think for a minute, the way they face forward and stare like no other bird, but rounder and wilder than any human eyes you have ever looked into.

A light wind blows the tufts above the feline ears and when the bird closes those huge eyes his face pinches in toward his tight, hooked beak. A tight face with little protrusion, disc-like. The tawny orange-gold feathers of his full chest are flecked with black and on his back the pattern is reversed: the black feathers flecked with orange-gold. He reaches up to scratch himself with great oversized talons, blades that can kill but that he now uses to scratch his tummy. He hears a twig snap and his head swivels. He is half-asleep one second, fully alert the next. When he hoots he puts his whole self into it, the white patch below his beak puffing out.

The bird is a Eurasian eagle-owl, a larger cousin of our great horned owl, in fact one of the largest of owls, competitive only with Blackiston’s fish owl in size. A predator, born to hunt, which its kind does masterfully. According to Jennifer Ackerman in What An Owl Knows, “The most powerful hunter of all owls, it is capable of pretty much taking anything it pleases—rabbits, geese, coots, foxes, even roe deer—surprising prey by flying close to the ground or treetops or seizing birds or bats in full flight.”

But this bird, raised in captivity and having had his food provided for him, isn’t yet ready to hunt for the poisoned city rats it will one day feast on, let alone roe deer. He stares out at the world through a pattern of steel mesh. While the euphemistic human name for this place is an enclosure, it is really a cage. The cage is roughly the size and shape of a department store window display, with a few dead branches to perch on. The view of the sky above is obscured by last fall’s dead oak leaves, with room to fly from branch to branch but more like hopping than real flight for an animal whose genes know it can soar hundreds of feet in the air, kettling on updrafts like a hawk. Its terrain is unvaried, domestic, so mostly the bird inside the cage looks forward through the steel mesh at the one landscape that at least changes, offering variety. This is the landscape, during the day at least, of human faces. He stares at them, they stare back. He does not feed; he is fed. He turns his neck, which he can rotate 270 degrees, and takes in the too-familiar place, the changing faces. A light wind ruffles the boa of white feathers below his neck. He sidesteps down the branch a little with his snowshoe feet and oversized talons.

A human being looking back in at the large bird, now thousands of miles from the taiga and rocky steppes of Europe and Asia and North Africa, where its kind evolved, might say it looked bored. But be careful. For many years human beings who studied animals and human beings who used words to describe them were warned not to attribute “human” emotions to animals. Anthropomorphism, the great crime. Only lately have common sense and empathy, bolstered by emerging science, returned to the scene and told us what we knew already. To say an animal is experiencing a certain feeling is not plastering a human emotion on an inhuman thing. It is allowing for the obvious, but somehow suppressed fact, that we co-evolved with creatures like this owl for millions of years, before splitting off and going our human way. No grand experiments are needed to conclude that emotion is part of our common heritage. Just watch a big cat prowl back and forth in the zoo. Just ask your dog if it wants to go for a walk.

So maybe bored is not the exact word, but something close. It, our fellow animal, lives a life where many of the things that have been encoded in it by the grand scheme of evolution have been denied. Not small things either. Sex. Food in the form of hunting. Flight. Soaring. Companionship.

Zoogoers sometimes complain about the bird. One day a man—for fun let’s dress him in a suede jacket and Addias sweatpants—tells a zoo-worker that the bird looks “grumpy.” Perhaps a more worthwhile experiment than questioning the use of anthropomorphism would be to separate this man from his children and place him in an enclosure for 13 years and see how he fares, whether or not he too would exhibit some grumpiness.  

This is how life is for our bird, and how life will be forever. To say that birds share our emotions is not to say that they share all of the evolutionary quirks we have picked up since our families split around 600 million years ago, particularly the brainy quirks that have developed over the last 700,000. While it is obvious that we are not the only animals who plan for the future (see squirrels and acorns) and who fear and care for their loved ones (see weeping elephants) we seem to have the market cornered, with the exception of a few chimps, on deep and neurotic pondering of our fates and eventual demise. Perhaps this is a small consolation for our friend in his enclosure. Perhaps. But if he doesn’t pass his days in Kierkegaardean contemplation of an endless drab future, he is not unaware of the sameness of his life. If he doesn’t know it in his mind, he feels it in his bones. Things will never change.

And then one night they do. Who knows what was in the minds of those who brought about this change, which for the bird, will be monumental? Maybe it was two PhDs from nearby Columbia who had spent the night before drinking coffee and arguing about the ethics of animal imprisonment, synapses sparking while touching on some of the issues discussed above. Maybe just two drunk kids. Or maybe it was a sole emancipator, a heroic loner with a love for birds, particularly the genus of bird whose beautiful and fitting Latin name was a perfect match for their nighttime adventure: noctua. An act of vandalism it was called and vandalism it was, perhaps. Emancipation works, too.   

One of the enduring mysteries of that night is that whoever cut the mesh has not been caught. And if they were caught now? At one point they might have been celebrated like ornithological Robin Hoods. Now, in the shadow of the necropsy report, would they be called murderers? (They basically already have on X, where a petition to catch “the vandal” quickly garnered  48,000 signatures.)

But back to our friend in his enclosure. How long did it take for him to notice that something had changed? How long did he take to approach this changed thing? He would have had no idea at first what this meant, but perhaps soon enough after the interlopers—his liberators it would turn out—left, he flew down to a lower branch see what there was to see. Hopped further out the branch in an awkward graceful way that would make later observers of his smile.

What he found was an opening, a spot where the mesh was cut and bent back, circular, not too much bigger than an owl. It wouldn’t have seemed at first what it would end up being: a portal to another world.

Curious, the owl perhaps turned his head, inspecting in that manner that has led human beings through the centuries to call his kind “wise.” And curiosity, another shared trait between his kind and ours, would have finally led him to step or fly or fly-hop through the portal.

To have been in a cage. For 13 years.

To not be in a cage.

Taking care not to anthropomorphize, let’s not say he immediately felt “free.”

Uncertainty, and attendant fear, would have likely been the prominent sensations. This was new territory, in every sense. Perhaps his first flight, after his escape, would have been over the waist-high black wrought iron fence that marked the zoo’s perimeter. (Any human could step over this after hours but what stopped them from doing this, as my friend at the zoo explained, was not the fence but cameras.) This initial flight would have landed Flaco almost face-to-face with his great tormenter, the Delacorte Clock.

Putting fears of anthropomorphizing aside, I don’t think I am overstepping by saying that clock had caused the poor bird torment. During his 13 years in the cage the clock, a mere hundred feet away, went off every half hour during daylight hours, the very hours when any sensible owl would be trying to get some rest. And by saying it “went off” I don’t mean it merely rung or gonged. I mean that every 30 minutes the clock went into full Broadway production mode, a full-on show that people gathered to see. The clock sits atop an arching passage over the east sidewalk adjoining the park, a three-layer affair, like a brick and concrete wedding cake, with a rotating stage on the first level, on which a cast of animals celebrate every daylight half-hour. Three notes, followed by the gong, and then the ringing chorus during which a bear playing tambourine, a penguin on drums, a kangaroo with a French horn, a goat with a flute, a hippo with a violin, and an elephant playing accordion turn in a slow circle. Above these dancers was the clock and above the clock a large bell which two monkeys forever threatened to strike with long-handled mallets. The song and dance of these rambunctious animals would have been a persistent sleep stealer for an animal with ears that could pick up the heartbeat of a vole under a foot of snow.

Once Flaco was over the fence, he might have flown toward the rhododendrons near the park’s border, and perhaps made his way out onto Fifth Avenue through the first human entrance into the park at East 64th. If he had flown in the other direction, west, he would have found the relative peace of some trees and even woods. But he didn’t know that; he was flying blind. His first flights were tentative, short, only three blocks from the zoo where he landed on the sidewalk around Fifth Avenue and 60th. Flaco loitered there for an hour, no doubt confused, and it was there he first drew the attention, if not yet the fascination and obsession, of New Yorkers.

As he flew south he would have had his initial encounter with new potential predators: the North American car and its subspecies, The New York taxi. Those first flights were short and awkward, and landing proved especially challenging. Having never had to really land he simply hadn’t learned how. Observers said that even the short flights seemed to exhaust him. When Edmund Berry, a birder and photographer, came upon him at 60th Street and Fifth Avenue, he was not sure the owl could fly. The bird simply sat on the sidewalk while onlookers gawked. Police blocked off the area with yellow tape and emergency workers tried to capture the bird. Berry took one picture of the bird looking askance at what appears to be a cat carrier that sits right next to him. For a few minutes it was touch and go; the Flaco story could have ended before it started. But finally the owl flew off.

Among other results, the bird’s escape would set off a year of bad puns and Dad jokes, and the NYPD was one of the first to indulge, tweeting, “Well. That was a hoot. We tried to save this little wise guy but he had had enough of his group of admirers and flew off.”   

It was a cold night and horns and beeping and general chaos greeted the owl as he flew south past the city bikes and pricey residential apartments and bus and subway stops and line of horse carriages. Doormen stared, shoppers paused to watch, the bustling crowd stopped bustling. After flying south he would have encountered his first grass since the park at the Grand Army Plaza with its gaudy gold statue of an angel leading General William Tecumseh Sherman somewhere, perhaps to the burning of Atlanta. Flaco’s own march continued through the plaza toward another statue, this of a naked woman holding some kind of fruit basket (the goddess Pomona, it turned out, signifying abundance in a strange tribute to Pulitzer, the newspaper king). There he perched in a tulip tree in front of the Plaza and Bergdorf Goodman, with its faceless mannequins dressed as flappers, one playing and one sitting on a piano, another, all of this in a display window reminiscent of Flaco’s recently-escaped home. Flaco spent the cold night in the tulip tree, annoyed, according to onlookers, by the twigs that kept getting in his eyes.

At dawn he lifted off and flew toward the park. Maybe this was instinct, or maybe he just got lucky, but either way it was a crucial move, away from cars and buildings and toward trees and a murky brown body of water known as the Pond and a small island of trees that was Hallet Sanctuary. Perhaps this relatively steep forested area spoke to something encoded in him, a familiar landscape even though he had never seen it before, though the steppes and rock ledges of his ancestral home did not have skyscrapers behind them.

It was a short flight of a few blocks from Bergdorf Goodman to Hallett, the smallest of Central Park’s woodlands at only four acres. Hallet rises against a backdrop of skyscrapers, still part of the city but separate. Its four acres are thickly wooded and during those first hours of freedom they would indeed serve as a sanctuary for Flaco. It is unlikely our owl friend hunted that first night or early morning; in fact he would not be seen hunting for over a week. Having been fed earlier that day, as he had been his entire life, hunger would not yet have gnawed. The next few days, and then weeks, would be marked by a reawakening of instinct, and his progress was at first slow. His human observers, who would soon be many, would note the balky flight, the hesitancy, the difficulty landing, and they would worry for him. Soon enough, however, they were using different words to describe his flight.

“Graceful” was one. 
 

To be continued in Part 2: Evolution…