Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,
And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.
I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.
You probably already know the story of Flaco, the eagle owl who flew the coop and lived free for a year in the wilds of New York City, so I won’t repeat the details.
In the year of his freedom, Flaco became an object of cult worship, and that’s no hyperbole. This phenomenon is worthy of a Ph. D thesis in hysteria and crowd formation. Cards: I was part of the cult. Since I live near Central Park and I was a worshiper, I visited him often, seeking out the various trees where he would perch. Visiting Flaco perked me up. It’s hard to explain, but looking at his serene magnificence up in those trees was inspiring.
I couldn’t, and still can’t, get enough of his pictures. His “facial expressions” ranged from a sweet childlike wonderment to a fiercely authoritative gaze that said, “I can rip out your guts. Try me.” Credit for that insight to Josh Nathan-Katz, who astutely looked up Flaco’s lineage in a studbook.
Wrote Katz:
The eagle-owl is not a sympathetic bird. Start with its face. There are, among the order Strigiformes, birds with goofy-looking faces, like the barred owl; birds with serene stares, like the snowy owl. The eagle-owl’s face is furious, commanded by orange eyes that convey the impression that it has considered the flavor of your intestines, and knows just how to get at them.
Interesting observations in light of the cult of Flaco.
In my humble opinion, Flaco was an exceptionally handsome specimen of a especially handsome species. He was the Errol Flynn of Eurasian eagle owls.1
From the start, I had vague reservations about the whole thing. I wanted him trapped and sent to a sanctuary. When they would coo and gasp over his hooting, I would tweet that he was calling for a mate and I’d be ignored or (sorry) hooted down. But… I went along. Eventually I stopped objecting and chimed in. I joined a Facebook group dedicated to his gorgeousness, and I got all warm and fuzzy when one of the top Flaco-TwiXers liked one of my tweets. Which is what happens in cult recruitment. You lose your critical faculties and get swept up.
The Central Park Zoo is run by arrogant mandarins. This small, dwindling caste from bygone days runs a bunch of high prestige places in the city, even in this day and age of wokeness. They’ll be gone soon but for now they still wield a lot of unseen power.
The Zoo mandarins made it clear that there was only one option: Flaco was to be captured and sent back to the enclosure where he had spent his first thirteen years. I never found out exactly how big this enclosure was. I read differing accounts. Some said he couldn’t even open his wings to their full span, others said it was the size of a city bus. I think both are exaggerations. Whatever the case, this majestic creature, which evolved to soar over mountains, lived in a tiny shithole for thirteen years.
A sane third option would have been to send him to a sanctuary, but this was never offered, so after a fruitless and hilarious couple of weeks trying to bait him, the Zoo capitulated to public opinion hysteria and called off the rescue mission, stating that they would “monitor” him. A year and many adventures later, all documented in minute detail, he was dead, most likely due to ingesting rodenticides.2
Flaco was always the Zoo’s responsibility. I don’t care how many damn groups and tweets and articles there were about Flaco, this is all on the Zoo. They abdicated and his death is on their conscience, if they have any.
But let’s return to our responses to Flaco.
Flaco love was fairly well distributed among all New Yorkers but according to my totally unreliable sampling, the majority of devotees were women whose insanely maternal responses were (sorry again) a hoot.
They would gush about how “adorable” Flaco was, how “cute” his talons were, and so on.
Cute? As Mr. Katz pointed out, Flaco could look pretty damned fierce.
But he could also look floofy:
And goofy:
And downright wistfully winsome, in his final weeks, peeping back at us through glass windows:
But mostly he looked grand, like a king, as befitted his scientific name: Bubo Bubo, Owl Owl, the owl of all owls.
But the main absurdity was, well, the whole thing. Flaco was just a bird—a damn gorgeous bird with a unique story—but a bird, no different from the thousands that inhabit the city. You wanna look at a bird? Go outside, there are birds everywhere. What made Flaco better than the pigeons my neighbor calls flying rats?
Nothing.
I adored him and still do. Sue me.
I didn’t know shit about owls before Flaco. Urban doofus that I am, I guess I thought they ate bird seed.
Nope! Owls are predators and the Eurasian eagle owl is an apex, as is its North American cognate, the Great Horned Owl. Those talons were meant to rip apart prey, and if you or I got close to this wild bird, what do you think he’d do? There’s a reason why trained falconers wear thick gloves.
For several months, Flaco hung out in various parts of Central Park, first the southern, more visited part, then a long stretch in the more remote northern areas. Then one day he went missing (Defcon 5 among the cult)—
And turned up in the East Village! He stayed there for a month or two, disappeared again (another Defcon) and flew back up to Central Park. For those of you who aren’t from NYC, that’s five miles. From a small enclosure to five miles in less than a year. That’s 60 million years of evolution speaking, guys. And flying back to Central Park is pretty amazing when you think of it. Somehow in that 60 million year old brain the location of Central Park got imprinted.
Then he did something really, I mean really, weird.
He left the park and began to fly around one of the neighborhoods adjacent to the park, the so-called Upper West Side. (My neighborhood.) Why he chose the UWS over the other adjacent neighborhood, the Upper East Side, is anyone’s guess, but I thought this was hilarious.3
What’s more important is what he did.
Flaco would perch on fire escapes or sills and look at people and I swear, that baleful eagle owl glare worthy of Poe turned into longing and wonderment.
WTAF? Who knows, but since I love to speculate, here goes.
Flaco spent the first thirteen years of his life being gawked at by human beings through a glass window. The experience became imprinted on his brain. After a lonely year of Odysseus-like searching for home, he returned to the only home he ever had, except flipped around. He was looking at us in our cages.
During the first part of his year of freedom, he would perch in various trees in Central Park. His fan club would site him, the news would go out on Twitter, we’d gather, we’d watch. The real fanatics would even monitor his fly-outs and returns to the perch with prey. True, he was almost never alone —but that just didn’t “do it” for him.
When he discovered he could replicate the experience of being looked at through a glass window, he never gave it up.
The apartments of the Upper West Side became the closest thing Flaco, the wild bird from somewhere in the vast expanse of Eurasia, ever had to a home. But not really.
On January 30 2024, Bruce Yolton, author of Urban Hawks, wrote:
It’s been amazing to get to know Flaco over the last year. He is stunningly beautiful and studying his behavior has been fascinating. And of course, his ability to survive in Manhattan has surprised everyone. But the story is much more complicated than a caged bird, now free to explore the world.
Flaco is living a life in purgatory now. He is in a dangerous environment without any chance of interacting with other of his species. And he could easily become a threat to local species.
No native Eurasian Eagle-Owl hoots as much as Flaco does. He’s confused. Sadly there may be now happy ending to this story. Unless he returned to Central Park in the spring, it would be difficult to capture him and place him in a sanctuary.
Folks can love him to death on social media, but it won’t keep him from dying prematurely from rodenticides.4
Most astonishingly in this entire astonishing story, Flaco died in a building on West 89th Street in which a notable birder lives. Think of what might have happened if he’d died somewhere else—he might have been thrown in the trash.
The superintendent of the building saw Flaco on the ground, still alive, and recognized him. More amazing synchronicity. He contacted the birder-tenant, who came as quickly as he could, and they rushed him to the Wild Bird Fund, which is on 89th Street and Columbus Avenue, another astonishing synchronicity. This is all too strange for words.
But it was too late. Flaco had a miserable death.
Let’s return to Josh Nathan Katz’s description of Flaco’s face, which inspired so much gushing: “The eagle-owl’s face is furious.”
Yes… But don’t you think the pics of Flaco peering into the windows are positively winsome?
It’s all in your brain.
Let’s talk about the way he died: rat poison. Only a very few people, virtually all hardcore animal “rights” activists, are suggesting that NYC not kill rats, which leads to the question: Why? Don’t rats have a right to live? Are they not God’s creatures as much as you, me, and handsome Flaco?
My YouTube feed is full of suggestions. I regularly get prompts to view videos of people who have adopted unlikely animals. Three stand out:
Statler, a flying fox bat who died at a bat sanctuary aged 34. Because it was about a bat, and even before Covid I found them loathsome, I was disgusted. Then I became charmed. Statler won me over. I just had to ignore the wings. But what a face. He was an adorable, sweet animal, who just loved to chomp on fruits… and sleep upside down. I still think that bats are loathsome.
The Scotswoman who adopted a bee with a deformed wing. Same deal—after an initial disgust reaction, I was charmed. (Bees don’t have a long life span, so this was another sad ending.)
The woman who adopted a rat right off the street. I’m not sure of the reason, perhaps the rat was injured. Rats, it so happens, are intelligent social creatures, not without charm. She taught it to do tricks, he related to her like a mom… Um, no. In this case, I simply could not get over my disgust. It’s a rat. (I will spare you pictures from this story.) God bless her but I would have left that rat to die. But I get it: that rat is just another mammal with whom we humans have many commonalities.5
And no, I would not have been disgusted by a tamed squirrel or chipmunk. Totally irrational.
Last, let’s talk about, Rover the bald eagle. He resided in Central Park for a while and never attained the heights of celebrity that Flaco did. He, too, died a sad urban death—a bald eagle in New York City! No memorials for him. Why?
Because he didn’t have a cult whose leaders played the media like a Stradivarius, and a media that profited from the duet.
Owls come to nest in Central Park often. Recently a couple of barred owls came for a visit. Then they were gone, missed but unmourned. Where’d they go? Home. As I read about them, it occurred to me, with a pang:
Flaco was homeless. He wasn’t a native bird who comes for a short stay and then flies off to a native habitat. All of this flying around and hooting was an indication of that. It was only then that “Flaco is living a life in purgatory now” hit me. Hit home to me.
At that point I broke with the cult and I realized that his fan club was a bunch of weirdos offloading their own issues onto Flaco, especially the resistance to acknowledging that he desperately needed a mate. (Analyze that!).
The whole thing was a monument to human greed, human folly, human careers, and human desires.
A lot of people made careers off Flaco, money, and got fifteen minutes or more of fame. His death has only increased the commercial appeal. Flaco, like Elvis, has left the building but he’s still a marketable commodity.
I’m sorry I ever had anything to do with them, even to respond to their tweets.
After reading Bruce’s posts and thinking the whole thing over, I left the Facebook group. It was run by a fascist who banned anyone who questioned the Flaco worship line. I removed some of the comments I’d put on the FB page about him.
I will try to stop looking at pictures of Flaco, but I’m not sure I can. I can appreciate his beauty as well as the sadness of his life and death.
I only know this:
Flaco was never free, and he was never at home, which may be the same thing.
LINKS
Josh Nathan-Katz, A Bad Omen On Fifth Avenue: contains links to the studbook.
Here’s a wonderful article about Eurasian eagle owls.
And here’s an article about the Great Horned Owl, a stealth bomber which “pound for pound and feather for feather, may be the greatest predator that has ever lived on earth”
What killed Flaco? Bruce Yolton describes the whole mess. I honestly didn’t realize how egregiously some of his savior wannabees had interfered with the Zoo’s (admittedly feeble) attempts to recapture him. I still hold them mostly responsible.
Credit for the photos: David Lei, Nan Knighton, and “Jackie UWS”
So called for their stunning wingspan, not because of any genetic affinity with eagles. It’s a bit confusing.
The toxicology report isn’t available but the necropsy indicated injury not consistent with collision.
Although they probably have more in common than differences (they’re both prosperous and overwhelmingly white) the UWS and the UES couldn’t be more different in attitude and reputation. The UES is rightly associated with wealth and luxury, the UWS with settled urban professionals. The two snobbiest avenues in New York City, Fifth Avenue and Park Avenue, are on the Upper East Side. It’s where the mandarins live. The Upper East Side matron wears expensive tailored clothing, the Upper West Side matron is a dowdy shlub.
Which is exactly what happened, on February 23.
An Israeli researcher pointed out that most rat studies are garbage, because they are performed on isolated, stressed out rats, and rats are intensely social creatures.