The Flaco Fandom Betrayed Their Beloved Owl

Flaco’s fans thought they were championing his freedom. Instead, they anthropomorphized him to death.

Flaco the Eurasian Eagle-Owl roosts in a Central Park oak tree on Oct. 19, 2023. Photo: Alex Tey/Rare Bird.

There’s the story of Flaco. And then there’s Flaco himself.

The popular narrative goes like this: An owl, liberated from the Central Park Zoo, escapes captivity to explore New York City on his own terms until his tragic death. If this motivates New Yorkers to defend wild animals in their city, that’s all for the better.

But Flaco’s story was never inspiring. It should have been clear the whole time, and now it’s even clearer in hindsight.

Witness accounts and a preliminary necropsy suggest that he died on Feb. 23 after falling from an Upper West Side apartment building—something difficult to imagine happening to a healthy wild owl. Postmortem testing revealed that he was suffering from pigeon herpesvirus and rodenticide poisoning, the Wildlife Conservation Society announced on Monday, March 25.

Alan Drogin is a birder living in the apartment building where Flaco sustained his fatal injuries. When his super called him to say at the owl that had been hanging around their building was lying limp on the ground, Drogin came down to find Flaco near death. He was the one who alerted wildlife rehabilitators at the nearby Wild Bird Fund.

He had been doubtful of Flaco’s prospects in the wild. On the owl’s year living out of captivity, “I don’t think that was much greater of a life,” Drogin told me.

This tragic ending makes obvious how fanciful the Flaco story was all along. It was the predictable outcome—many warned of it, in fact—but people who called themselves his fans wanted to see a story that was never there.

The narratives spun around Flaco’s “freedom” were a result of people seeing what they wanted to see. Anthropomorphism, the ascribing of human traits to nonhumans, ran rampant.

“I understand people’s projection; that’s a very human thing to do,” Drogin said.

Flaco’s fans wanted a story of escape, of freedom, of agency, so that’s the one they told. The reality is that this owl lived a life of few choices.

Flaco was hatched in captivity in 2010, the offspring of two parents who themselves had also been hatched in captivity. His life at the Central Park Zoo was unglamorous at best, perhaps even miserable. But at least he was comfortable.

Set that against the panic he must have experienced when he was “liberated” from the only roost he had ever known. Let loose into the city, Flaco was forced into a landscape he wasn’t built to understand.

Flaco was made of the bones, feathers, genes, and instincts of a wild animal. Neither he nor his forebears had ever been domesticated—and yes, there is something evocative about imagining wildness still ticking inside a caged beast. It’s tempting to see yourself in him.

It remains genuinely amazing that he was able to survive as long as he did. Flaco had never had to hunt for his own food before; survival rates during juvenile predatory birds’ first winter of independence can be dismally low.

But he made it, relying on sheer instinct and his considerable power as a member of the world’s heftiest owl species: The largest Eurasian Eagle-Owls even outweigh the smallest Bald Eagles. Flaco, a smaller male weighing in at a bit over four pounds, was on the daintier side for a Eurasian Eagle-Owl, but still nothing to scoff at.

From the fear and confusion, he managed to eke out an existence, even seeming to settle into a routine. He’d snooze in an oak tree in the north end of Central Park most days after his nighttime hunts, and embarked on a few exploratory visits—around Halloween, to the East Village, and before his death, to the Upper West Side.

Flaco was accustomed to humans, so it figures that he was able to adapt to the city in ways that native owl species often cannot. Because wild owls are typically solitary, nocturnal predators that rely on remaining undetected, they’re highly sensitive to human disturbance.

The American Birding Association’s Code of Birding Ethics implores birdwatchers to avoid stressing birds, particularly around roosts. Ecologist Don Freiday, noting that the particular habits of owls require special care, proposed a stricter owl-seeker’s code in a 2011 post on the ABA blog.

“If I am lucky enough to find a roosting owl, I will use most extreme discretion about who to tell about my findings, and especially about who I take to see the bird,” Freiday encouraged readers to vow. “I will seriously consider not telling anyone.”

Flaco, fortunately, didn’t mind the onlookers. On the occasions when I visited him at his Central Park roost, he was dozing away on a favorite tree branch. Though he occasionally half-opened an eye to squint at passers-by, he appeared unbothered, even tranquil.

For birders concerned about ethics, owls are a third rail. Those who share where owls roost can expect pushback and a less-than-stellar reputation in the birding community.

That’s how many New York City birders see David Barrett, the former hedge fund manager who operates the Manhattan Bird Alert account on Twitter. He’s been criticized for pushing the boundaries of ethical birdwatching—including broadcasting the locations of roosting owls. (I asked to interview Barrett, whom I regularly corresponded with back when I began birding in New York, but he stopped responding when I told him of the piece’s critical approach.)

“I knew Flaco was going to be a celebrity bird even before I saw him myself,” Barrett told Audubon magazine last year. The Manhattan Bird Alert account, already in the tens of thousands of followers, gained further notoriety with frequent Flaco updates. The Flaco fever it harnessed wasn’t always welcome.

“Whatever your intent, your need to seem relevant or involved in this effort is not at all helpful,” Bronx Zoo director Jim Breheny wrote in a since-deleted response to one Manhattan Bird Alert post. “In fact, you are a hindrance.”

Barrett’s posts revealed where and when zoo staff would attempt to return Flaco to the safety of captivity. Crowds gathered to observe—and obstruct—the zoo’s recapture efforts.

Some accountability may be due for Barrett now that Flaco is dead because, in part, of the failed attempts to recapture him. But there is no individual person to hold responsible for Flaco’s fatal year in the wild. I would be surprised if the vandal who tore open his enclosure was ever found, and while Barrett had a larger platform than most, he was only channeling the enthusiasm of the owl’s legion of fans.

These fans didn’t love Flaco, even if they thought they did. They loved the idea of Flaco, and those views were mediated through a cultural lens tuned by Disney movies and social-media stardom. One sentiment I frequently saw expressed was that freedom is worth any price—including the risk of death. Better to die on the wing than live in a cage, some seemed to say.

All those gushy tweets and zealous petitions were driven by genuine, well-meaning, but inescapably human emotion.

Perhaps, living a hectic life in a crowded city, you might feel confined in some way yourself. Seeing a noble creature uncaged might have inspired in you a vicarious thrill. You might have wanted him to feel the same way you’d feel in his situation.

That’s the anthropomorphism talking. Animals deserve compassion and respect—even rights—but on their terms, not ours. If we are to show them love, we must do so in ways that accommodate their experience of the world.

For Flaco, the wild brought excitement through terror. The desperate struggle for survival known to every animal in the wild was tempered only by his captive-bred naivete. No lofty ideal of liberty—as foreign to him as a raw pigeon dinner is to us—would have been any consolation.

Instead of imposing a human story onto Flaco’s life, let him motivate you in whatever cause you feel drawn toward. Make windows safer for birds. Curtail the use of rat poison. Campaign for humane zoos, better wildlife sanctuaries, maybe even an end to captive breeding for exhibition.

But don’t let any that erase the bird himself. Take him on his own terms, because so many failed to do so when he was alive. That was part of what killed him.

There is no single neat, proximate cause for Flaco’s death. It’s generally accepted that he hit a window, although much of the evidence points to a fatal fall; he probably wouldn’t have lasted long in the city anyway, although disease and poison likely hastened the process.

With all the pitfalls awaiting an urban bird of prey, though, an early death of some kind was essentially inevitable once recapture attempts were abandoned. The fact that he had to face those threats at all, though, was not. Flaco deserved better than a life in a cage, but it’d be hard to argue that what he got was any better.

Once he was out, Flaco fans, acting out of a professed affection for him, endeavored to keep him there. There, he died.

To take Flaco as an inspiration is to miss the point. His year of so-called freedom was tragic from the start.