Death of a New York Celebrity

Flaco the Eurasian Eagle-Owl: March 15, 2010 – February 23, 2024

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Flaco, the escaped Eurasian Eagle-Owl in Central Park, NY. Photo by Rhododendrites, CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Sunday update ¹

Friday night, the most famous bird in New York City was killed in a collision with a window on an Upper West Side building.

Flaco the Eurasian Eagle Owl, a stunningly beautiful and charismatic bird, made national news on February 2, 2023, when a vandal shredded his mesh enclosure in Central Park Zoo, where the captive-bred owl had spent his entire 13-year life starting soon after he hatched at the Sylvan Heights Bird Park in Scotland Neck, North Carolina in 2010.

Millions of people had seen him at the zoo, but when the vandal struck, Flaco became an instant celebrity. His species is related to our own Great Horned Owl but has orange instead of yellow eyes and is even larger. The only owl in the known universe bigger than the Eurasian Eagle-Owl is Blakiston’s Fish-Owl of northern Asia.

Such a huge, charismatic bird loose in Manhattan naturally drew media attention and crowds of people. Birders couldn’t count Flaco as a wild bird, but even the most ardent listers were drawn to the amazing creature, along with a great many non-birders. Last March, Flaco was the subject of the very first post I made on Substack. I’m very sad that I never got to see him.

Just about everyone who heard of Flaco’s escape had an instant, strongly held opinion about it. Most saw him as a romanticized hero, “finally” “flying free,” to live a “natural life,” though he’d never ever find a mate. An eagle-owl’s natural habitat in Europe and Asia is a wee bit different from New York City, where collisions with window glass kill almost a quarter of a million birds every year and where poisoned rats often get taken by predators who in turn are poisoned.

A few predators do succeed admirably in such treacherous terrain—when I’ve visited Manhattan over the years, I’ve seen urbanized Peregrine Falcons flying overhead and a Barred and an Eastern Screech Owl roosting in Central Park. Pale Male, the famous Red-tailed Hawk who nested on a building on 5th Avenue for decades, was a prime example of a thriving New Yorker.

Most successful urban birds were raised and educated by their parents in the urban environment, yet despite their savvy, every one of them dies sooner or later, often killed in collisions with windows or vehicles, or poisoned. Clearly, an eagle-owl who had been sheltered from such dangers his whole life was in peril from the moment he got out of the enclosure.

News of Flaco’s tragic death spread like wildfire, sparking a sense of genuine loss and even bereavement in a great many people. One reaction disturbed me—how many people commented “predictable” when I posted a link to the story on Facebook. Nothing about Flaco’s celebrity life was predictable, from the vandalism that sparked his escape to his death.

After the first week or so, Flaco’s death was no longer “predictable” except in the sense that every bird, and every one of us humans, eventually dies.

Yes, at least a billion birds are killed by window glass in the United States every year, a sizeable percentage of them in Manhattan. Yes, eating poisoned rats kills many New York City predators. Every single day, birds die in New York from these and myriad other causes.

But still. If I put 386 coins into a slot machine before anything came out, could I call my winning “predictable”? Every one of the 386 days that Flaco survived was a triumph in which he defied the odds. After the first week or so, his impending doom was no longer predictable except in the sense that every bird, and every one of us humans, eventually dies.

I’m glad Flaco lived on this planet with me. I’m sad that he escaped from the zoo but glad that he survived for over a year on his own terms. From the moment he hatched in 2010, he was destined to educate people at the zoo, and it’s ironic that he became even more successful at educating us after he escaped. My friend Mark Kastel wrote, “Whenever a wild animal becomes famous it elicits more awareness and empathy from others who might not have been paying attention.”

Now, perhaps even in death Flaco will educate us by sparking a bigger awareness of just how lethal windows are and what we should be doing about it. If so, ultimately Flaco’s legacy may include helping the next charismatic New Yorker to survive even longer.

1. I discovered that the Central Park Zoo sent out this press release about Flaco’s necropsy an hour after I posted. The International Owl Center posted this information on Facebook about the necropsy:

Initial necropsy results for Flaco the Eurasian Eagle Owl are consistent with acute traumatic injury, but there are some things that point toward rodenticides as a contributing factor:
-Bleeding behind one eye with no signs of head trauma
-"Substantial hemorrhage under the sternum and in the back of the body cavity around the liver" (anticoagulant rodenticides cause internal hemorrhaging)
-He had no broken bones at all

Large owls can handle substantial injuries, including broken bones without dying (think of all the images you've seen of Great Horned Owls getting hit by cars and surviving while stuck in the grill). To die of "acute trauma" with no signs of head injury or broken bones is fishy.

Avian influenza and West Nile Virus both produce significant neurological symptoms which would have been visible to observers, so both seem unlikely.

There was no note of lesions in his mouth in the necropsy report, so trichomoniasis from eating pigeons does not seem to have been an issue for him.

It will take a few weeks to get the toxicology reports back, but we will not be surprised if multiple rodenticides are detected in significant amounts in his system.