Most of you know that I am a huge fan of owls. I love watching them around the ranch, and I got a big kick out of reading about the adventures of Flaco, the Eurasian Eagle Owl that lived free in New York City for over a year after escaping from his enclosure at the Central Park Zoo last February.
Zookeepers were certain that Flaco wouldn’t survive outside a zoo environment because he’d never been taught to hunt. They desperately tried to recapture him, but all of their attempts failed. I loved watching videos of Flaco hanging out in trees and flying around Manhattan. He made his living eating rats and pigeons (or as I like to call them, rats with wings).
I checked in at least monthly looking for Flaco updates. It made me giggle to read about him being sighted in the East Village, pictures of him resting on ledges of expensive apartments, and eating unlucky rodents.
Flaco was the ultimate feel-good story. Just as he celebrated a year of freedom, the sad news was released. Flaco had been found dead in the courtyard of a NYC apartment building. He’d flown into the side of the building and sustained catastrophic injuries. The vets at the Central Park Zoo conducted a necropsy and determined that he’d been critically ill due to a severe pigeon herpes infection. He had contracted the disease by eating local pigeon. He also had high levels of rat poison in his system from eating poisoned rats.
Seems poor Flaco died as a result of eating infected pigeons and poisoned rats. I guess you could draw all kinds of inferences from this story. On the negative side, you could conclude that Flaco is an example of something pure that was destroyed by the filth and disease that is endemic to any large city.
Personally, I’d rather focus on the positives. Flaco was a plucky survivor. He escaped the confines of a zoo enclosure and went for it. He resisted every effort zookeepers made to bait and recapture him. He taught himself to hunt and he seemingly enjoyed a year of eating urban junk food and hanging out in the city that never sleeps. I admit to wondering what Flaco thought of his new digs in Central Park. Did he know that he was a celebrity? Did he enjoy all the new sights and sounds? Were pigeons and rats an owl version of hotdogs and pizza?
I guess in the end, I’m glad he got a year of freedom even if that freedom shortened his life. I’ll miss him. I enjoyed watching him and reading about his adventures. He made me smile. Now I’ll have to go back to focusing my owl obsession on our local species and birds.
If this makes me a little “eggcentric”, well that’s just eggscellent!
Kris Stewart is a rancher in Paradise Valley, Nevada.