This Owl Will Live Forever

The Atlantic

15-02-2025

Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023, is still with us (even though he's dead).
He spent about a year roaming New York City—hunting in the park, hooting from fire escapes—and in that time, he became a celebrity. Then he flew into a building while disoriented by rat poison and pigeon herpes. It has been a year since Flaco's untimely death, and now the New York Historical is hosting an exhibition memorializing his life. I went on opening day, in the middle of business hours, and found the space packed with Flaco fans. ('I couldn't move,' Rebecca Klassen, the museum's curator of material culture, told me afterward.)
'Packed' is an unusual state for a historical society. But people were eager to look, in person, at photos they most likely had already seen online: Flaco flying, Flaco preening, Flaco peering in a window, Flaco sitting on a pitcher's mound. An older woman with a cane stood in front of a photo of Flaco avoiding recapture and chuckled to herself, then said quietly, 'Marvelous.'
'The Year of Flaco' features videos and photographs of the beloved bird, as well as dozens of trinkets and letters that were left at a memorial for Flaco at the base of an oak tree in Central Park last March. Those items were collected and stored by a group of Flaco fans, who over the summer presented Klassen with the idea for the exhibition. Klassen was convinced by their sincerity and their presentation about Flaco's significance to the city. She told The New York Times, 'He was a raptor. Raptors have a hold on people,' which I thought was fantastic reasoning.
The exhibition takes up half of a long, narrow space that could more accurately be called 'a hallway.' But it tells Flaco's story in satisfying detail. Flaco escaped from the Central Park Zoo when an unknown vandal cut open the mesh of his enclosure. Though zoo employees initially made several attempts to recapture Flaco, mostly out of concern for his ability to care for himself in the 'wild' (New York City), they gave up because he was evading them so well and because he started hunting and seemed to be enjoying his exciting new life. He mostly roamed Central Park, but in the fall of 2023, he took a few trips downtown. One day he was photographed sitting on the fire escape of a building on the Upper West Side. At the exhibition, this image—-and the idea of such an encounter—nearly brought me to tears. Imagine if that had happened to you! (Imagine if that had happened to me!) The luck of some people.
You may think this feeling is out of proportion, and you may not be wrong, but I am not alone. Flaco was the pride of the city for a season—or four—and Michiko Kakutani, the legendary and technically retired Times book critic, came back to write not one but two reported stories about him. He was somehow petite and precious (weighing only a few pounds) but also huge and terrifying (wingspan of about six feet). Just after he escaped, my colleague Matteo Wong used the words of Walt Whitman to describe him: 'well-form'd, beautiful-faced, looking you straight in the eyes.' It's true: His irises were a gorgeous shade of chrysanthemum orange. His talons looked like they could maim a medium-size dog. In letters displayed at the New York Historical, fans are startlingly—and even unsettlingly—vulnerable. They express attachment to Flaco that goes into the realm of the feelings they might have for their own actual pet, or for a person (one thanks Flaco for inspiring the writer to apply to law school). Others are short and sweet: 'Fly high, Flaco'; 'Freedom and peace our beautiful hero.' There is one acrostic poem: 'Fabulous / Liberated / Awesome / Captivating / Owl.'
After Klassen asked visitors if they had any Flaco stories to share, a woman in a cream turtleneck told me and the other onlookers that she'd gotten a Flaco tattoo on her back that she couldn't show—because of the turtleneck—and that it was a cityscape done by an artist who has painted murals of Flaco. The woman shared that she'd seen Flaco herself on seven or eight occasions while running in the park. Sometimes, a crowd was around him already. If one wasn't, she would keep his secret. 'I would see him and I would wink,' she said.
Flaco was perpetually hounded by paparazzi (regular people with iPhones), and his apparent ease in that situation was what made him such a good celebrity. Many random animals do become symbols and social-media stars. When they die, we mourn them, but they also trigger our imagination ('I think for a lot of people, he symbolized that all things are possible,' the actor Alan Ruck said about Los Angeles's favorite mountain lion, P-22, five months after he was hit by a car.) Think of the tragic story of Harambe the gorilla, which challenged the premise of zoos and then became a distasteful meme. Think of the white-tailed deer in Harlem that was labeled a Christmas reindeer just because he happened to appear in December. His death—though it actually had nothing to do with our lives—was read as poetic because it came at the end of 2016, when many New Yorkers were already quite emotional and glum due to the first election of President Donald Trump.
And though we like any animal with a story, we like escaped animals best. When some poor beast escapes from whatever zoo or circus or (sorry) slaughterhouse we put them in, we love to see it. We want them to get out. We want them to live like us. This is projection to an understandable but somewhat morbid degree. Many Flaco fans, including my co-worker Matteo, described Flaco as a New Yorker while he was alive, but of course, Flaco didn't know what New York was or that he lived there. Others said he was an immigrant, though this is not true—his is a non-native species, but he was born in North Carolina. They said he was proving that everyone longs for freedom and the American dream, but he didn't know about rights and probably didn't even know about longing. They said he was gritty, but I honestly don't know what that means when you're talking about a bird.
Now that he is dead, we are thrusting martyrdom onto him. I think we love Flaco still, after all this time, because he lived on our toxic planet and in our wretched (wonderful) city that is so inhospitable to life, and he did it with dignity, grace, and humor until he couldn't—until he lost all control of his faculties and died alone.