In February 2023, a male Eurasian-eagle owl escaped from his vandalized Central Park Zoo enclosure in New York City. Until his death a year later, the owl’s journey through Manhattan was intensely chronicled by birders, reporters, tourists and just about everyone else. In The Book of Flaco: The World’s Most Famous Bird, prolific nature writer David Gessner documents that phenomenal year with keen wit and scrutiny.
Hatched and raised in captivity, Flaco lived in a cage the size of a department store display window. The vandals—or liberators?—who cut the steel mesh of his enclosure skillfully avoided detection by a nearby camera. Suddenly free to roam, the raptor had to learn how to fly, catch his meals (mostly rats) and—his biggest challenge—avoid the admiring hordes following him everywhere. Recapture attempts by the zoo grew complicated as online birders alerted crowds to his locations. Culture wars and controversy flared as New Yorkers and the world debated no less than the conditions of freedom: Should authorities capture Flaco and, probably, save his life by returning him to his enclosure? Or would doing so end the much more worthy, though dangerous, life that he was now experiencing at last?
When Flaco eventually left Central Park’s trees for the city’s rooftops, ledges and sheltering courtyards, his followers fretted. When he perched and peered into their windows with his huge orange eyes, they fell in love. Among the many New Yorkers Gessner colorfully depicts is playwright Nan Knighton, who shared an afternoon with Flaco when he visited her 13th floor window. “I missed that surreal, wondrous, exciting, and funny time with him,” she admits to Gessner after the owl’s death. “I still do.”
With wisdom earned from his own experiences following ospreys and snowy owls, and in a style both engrossing and endearing, Gessner suggests that the story of Flaco has many lessons to teach us: about risk-taking, rat poisoning, a zoo’s responsibility and anthropomorphism. And hooting. Flaco hooted everywhere, long and loudly, in search of a mate, of another owl, of some connection to . . . something. He never found it. The Book of Flaco suggests that when we humans free ourselves to explore and learn, we may come to understand Flaco’s hoot, and our own nature.
