INDIGNITY VOL. 3, NO. 15: Free bird.
MAN VS. NATURE DEP'T.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
The Indignity Morning Podcast
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Flaco the Eagle-Owl Tastes Freedom and Live Rats
FLACO THE EURASIAN Eagle-Owl didn't really become Flaco the Eurasian Eagle-Owl until things went wrong. Before February 2, when someone cut open his pen in the Central Park Zoo—or really February 3, when people started hearing about his escape—he was just some bird in the zoo. I can construct a memory of having seen him there, and it might be true, but I certainly never lingered to get to know him.
Flaco was not up there with the snow leopards or red pandas, as attractions go. The Central Park Zoo's Instagram didn't bother calling him "Flaco" in its two posts I could find about him over the past five years. One was making a "superb owl" joke at Super Bowl time last year, and the other was making an "Owl-oween" joke in 2018.
Now he's famous, like Cecil the Lion. He is an event. People are going to the park to have a look at him. My mom was asking me if I'd seen him yet. I told her I hadn't.
I told her I was confused about the premise behind birdwatchers going to birdwatch Flaco. As other people have said, they could have already seen him any day they wanted before now, for the price of a zoo ticket. He is a bird, and he is an item of interest, but he's not in Central Park because the mysterious forces of nature carried him somewhere new and strange. He's not like the Steller's sea eagle that wandered out of Siberia in 2021 and has been hanging around in the wrong hemisphere ever since, currently in coastal Maine. Flaco is in New York because he got shipped here.
The birdwatchers themselves have been fighting about the ethics of watching Flaco, along their usual fighting lines. The Manhattan Bird Alert account on Twitter is tracking and publicizing every move the owl makes, and the zoo's countermoves as they happen. The people who view Manhattan Bird Alert as recklessly indifferent to birds' peace of mind see all of this as a perfect illustration. The Urban Hawks blog—in a post titled "Will Social Media Kill Flaco?"—denounced the "gawkers and photographers" drawn by Manhattan Bird Alert, saying they had "no awareness of traps or how important it was to stay far away from them."
Flaco, meanwhile, appeared to be figuring out a thing or two about traps, or at least to be losing interest in the things—the familiarity of the zoo grounds, free dead rats to eat—that would have gotten him trapped. He was not the hopeless idiot that the original reports made him out to be, baffled and incompetent from a life spent in confinement. After blundering out to Fifth Avenue early on, he seems to have figured out the difference between the part of the city that has trees and animals in it and the other part of the city. And he is killing and eating his own rats.
As of this morning, the zoo announced it was backing off from its efforts to lure and snare him, conceding defeat in the first round of the owl recovery. "Our observations indicate that he seems to be comfortable in the area of the park where he has been hunting," the announcement said, "and we don't want to do anything to encourage him to leave this site." The zoo said it would still "look to opportunistically recover him when the situation is right."
Nature is not exactly taking its course. But when does it ever? I saw the barred owl dubbed Barry in the Ramble, back when Barry was a sensation. I didn't even try; we just went for a walk and ran into a crowd of people looking up. That was a real encounter with wildlife, living wild. Then one night Barry got hit by a Parks Department truck.
For now, Flaco has traded his captivity for a slightly larger captivity. (Insert your own knowing sigh here.) At 1.3 square miles, Central Park would be at the small end of recorded Eurasian eagle-owl territory sizes, which grow more compact as prey grows more abundant. There are only so many places to perch. But the rats are plentiful.
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