One of the best things about being a real estate agent in New York is I get to be a sort of tour guide for newcomers in the city. Only a minority of agents who work in the city are actually from here, and being a native New Yorker is my brand. I love to share my deep knowledge and love of the city I grew up in with my clients, and they seem to love it too. So many events and moments have happened in the past 400 years and then disappeared to collect dust on the library shelves that is New York City history, it’s hard to chronicle them all.
For the last year, Flaco, an Eurasian eagle owl, has become one of the stories. The owl, native to Central Asia, lived for nearly 13 years in the Central Park Zoo until a vandal cut a hole in his cage, allowing him to break free on February 2, 2023. After a few weeks of trying to recapture Flaco, out of fear he would be unable to fend for himself, the owl did a very New York thing – he proved everyone wrong. He successfully hunted and found an oak tree to roost in. Thereafter, the Wildlife Conservation Society, the group that runs our city’s zoos and aquarium, let him live free. For the next year, Flaco became part of the city’s energy. People descended on Central Park to catch a glimpse of the bird, hear it hoot and, if they were lucky, watch it hunt. He rarely left Central Park, only doing so for the first time last November for a short jaunt to the East Village, before heading back north to Central Park again. During the late fall and early winter, he was regularly spotted on fire escapes and water towers on the Upper West Side and his nightly hoots became as much a part of the Manhattan ambiance as ambulance sirens and honking car horns.
Sadly, Flaco died Friday evening after colliding with a building on the Upper West Side. The WCS will conduct a necropsy but it’s been suggested that Flaco may have been ill the past few days as he hadn’t been heard hooting recently.
Flaco became a symbol of surviving and thriving in New York, especially for non-natives who empathized with that struggle. People, perhaps unhealthily, projected their own struggles onto Flaco. Leftists presented his story as a parable about prison abolition, while libertarians saw him first as a victim of, and then as a symbol of “breaking free” from, the incompetent and corrupt bureaucracy of the state. With so much chaos happening in the world and in the city, many New Yorkers, and people from outside the city, allowed themselves to take a mental break by observing and celebrating Flaco’s adjustment to freedom. He became our escape and our therapy.
For months I considered writing a children’s book based on Flaco’s experiences, but held off, worried about how his story might end. While my heart wanted to believe Flaco would live many years of freedom in Central Park, or perhaps find his way elsewhere, my brain told me Flaco’s story wouldn’t end happily. Wildlife and New York often don’t go well together. Just this week, Rover, a bald eagle that regularly soared over Central Park since 2022, was killed in a vehicle collision on the Henry Hudson Parkway while trying to scavenge the carcass of a dead raccoon. Barry, a well-known barred owl died in Central Park in 2021 after ingesting a poisoned rat, becoming disorientated, and colliding with a park maintenance vehicle. It’s possible Flaco met the same fate.
In the coming days and weeks, there will be memorials and vigils for Flaco, but over time his memory will fade into the background, cherished by the many who lived in New York in the year he took to our skies.
In 1998, in honor of the centennial of the consolidation of New York City’s Five Boroughs, the Daily News published a book called Big Town, Big Time, a volume of 192 historical stories about New York from Henry Hudson’s arrival to Rudy Giuliani’s “quality of life” policies. The chronicle included some of those stories that captured New Yorkers’ attention at the time but have become just part of the folklore that natives, like me, can tell you about; stuff like the disturbing story of Ota Benga, the tragic tale of Johnny Wade, the sage of the tugboat Break Of Dawn. You’ve probably never heard of any of these, but these stories are as much part of the fabric of the city as society-wide historical events like 9/11. Over the last year, I thought about how Flaco would be part of a book like that.
I expect that one day I’ll be telling some new New Yorkers the legend of the owl that escaped the zoo, captivated the city for an entire year, and reminded us how to survive and thrive and how little time we have in this life. There will be a sense of emptiness without Flaco, but New York will never forget him, or allow anyone else to.
So interesting. I hadn't heard about the owl.