Flaco the Eurasion eagle-owl...born in 2010 in a North Carolina zoo, died in Manhattan, New York on Feb. 23, 2024

I'm sure many people have already heard or read about his death, but I've only seen a little blurb or two on any TV news. Considering what a celebrity Flaco became after escaping (with help from a likely well-meaning vandal) from his reportedly closet-sized enclosure at the Central Park Zoo, I'm surprised I haven't heard more than a brief mention of his demise.
Sad news, that he only had a little over a year free of freedom...after being imprisoned his whole life in an undeniably too small "habitat". Right from the start, there was concern that Flaco would ingest the poison commonly and freely used to kill rodents and other creatures considered "varmints" by some. A poison that is surely an indiscriminate killer of many beings aside the intended targets, and results in a slow, painful death. It is unknown at this point, if that was the cause of Flaco either flying into a building, or falling from a high place on a building. People who were accustomed to seeing and hearing him, said he'd become silent in the days before he was found dying.

Flaco was far from the native habitat he never knew, of course. Yet he managed quite well being free in the urban chaos of a big city, for a time. I've read several articles by those who were rooting for this escaped owl's well-being, and were saddened to learn of his death. I particularly like what this New York Times opinion writer, Margaret Renki, expressed about him:

[quote]Flaco had spent his life among our kind and seemed to be as curious about us as we were about him. He perched on fire escapes and air-conditioners. He peered into windows, blinking those huge, inscrutable eyes. In his glorious wildness, he tolerated our oohs and ahs, our long lenses, our honking taxis and our double-decker buses and our wailing sirens. Somehow he found his way among our glass-clad canyons, navigated the inexplicable patterns of our traffic and our days.

Flaco knew us. He felt like a friend.

But there were things he did not know about our kind. The rats he killed and ate, to human cheers? He didn’t know they were laced with poison. The windows he peered into? He didn’t know they could, in certain light, give back the sky and the street trees. He didn’t know that reflections in glass aren’t real trees or the real sky.[/quote]

I'm glad Flaco had the chance to really fly and be sort of free, at least for a while. 💫