Owl’s Well That Ends Well For Manhattan’s Most Famous Wild Animal

Flaco the Eurasian Eagle Owl has become a New York celebrity since he escaped his enclosure at the Central Park Zoo early in 2023.

He’s been spotted flying through the concrete canyons of midtown, perched on fire escapes on the upper east side and ridding New York of its vermin — but he’s not your friendly neighborhood Spiderman.

He’s Flaco the Eurasian eagle-owl and New Yorkers have been rooting for him ever since he escaped from a small enclosure in Central Park Zoo and decided the entire park and its environs would be his domain.

Since then, Flaco has evaded capture, put aside concerns that he’d be able to survive in the big city and shocked the hell out of New Yorkers who have seen the curious little guy’s face pressed against the glass of their apartment windows, watching them intently.

“I audibly gasped,” 24-year-old Matt Sweeney told the Wall Street Journal after he realized something or someone was watching him through the window of his upper west side apartment.

“It absolutely scared the you-know-what out of me,” 31-year-old actress Reilly Richardson told the paper after she woke up one morning to find the peeping predator watching her from outside. “It’s New York City. It’s the last thing you expect to see.”

Flaco escaped Central Park Zoo in February after his enclosure, where he lived for 12 years, had been “vandalized,” according to zoo staff. It turns out someone sliced an opening in the mesh, giving Flaco an out which he quickly took advantage of.

For the next few months zookeepers chased him around Central Park, trying to lure him back with food and the recorded sounds of other owls, but Flaco wasn’t having it. In the meantime he became a celebrity, New York’s version of the famous mountain lion P-22, with crowds of birders and curious onlookers assembling to watch and photograph him.

Flaco NYC
Credit: New Yorker Robin Herbst-Paparne, who spotted Flaco outside her apartment. Via WSJ

Social media accounts tracking the raptor’s movements sprung up online, and all the attention became too much. Even though zookeepers gave up on returning him to his enclosure, Flaco apparently decided he was done being watched and became the watcher.

Since then he’s popped up all over Manhattan, delighting New Yorkers and giving others a scare as they noticed the two-foot owl tracking them from a fire escape or a window perch. In early November he left the comfy confines of Central Park — possibly spurred by the crowds and commotion of the annual NYC Marathon — and began exploring the city proper, popping up in random places each day.

Initially people were worried Flaco, who had spent his entire life in captivity, wouldn’t be able to feed himself. The owl quickly put those concerns to rest as he proved adept at feasting on New York’s abundant rodents, earning himself the nickname “New York’s Rat Czar” at a time when Mayor Eric Adams has declared war on the vermin.

Experts are divided on why Flaco is spending so much time watching people. As the only known Eurasian eagle owl living “wild” in North America, the little guy may be looking for a mate. They say he won’t find one of his species, but he could find an unpaired female of another species if he’s lucky.

Others say Flaco, who was raised by humans and isn’t afraid of our species, may believe a human could be his mate. That’s another way his predicament mirrors that of P-22, who settled in Los Angeles’ Griffith Park and became a local celebrity, but was cut off from potential mates by busy highways and miles of human-inhabited land.

Flaco
Nan Knighton, whose apartment faces Central Park, snapped this shot of Flaco outside her apartment.

Regardless, people in New York are enchanted by the unusual resident and delighted to see him. Nan Knighton, who took the above photo (via WSJ) told the paper she had an intense encounter with Flaco. After realizing a pair of intense eyes were tracking her inside her home, she made friends with the curious owl:

He stuck around for three hours. 

“I talked to him,” says Knighton, recalling telling Flaco he’s beautiful and gorgeous, and that she couldn’t believe she was speaking to an owl. When she walked into another room, Flaco’s head swiveled to follow her. 

Flaco stayed quiet until Knighton got within 6 inches of his face. “He just let out this little tiny hiss,” she says. “It was kind of like, ‘OK, I like you, but I don’t want to be beak to beak.’”

She turned her back to the owl to write something down. When she looked back, Flaco was gone.

Flaco_with_trap
Flaco proved too smart for zookeepers who tried to entice him with traps like the one above. Credit: Wikimedia Commons

26 thoughts on “Owl’s Well That Ends Well For Manhattan’s Most Famous Wild Animal”

  1. Please view via littlebuddythecat.com, not the WordPress reader, to see the properly formatted page and photos.

    Flaco is not the Eurasian eagle owl I photographed for an earlier post on PITB. That owl’s name is Quincy and he lives at the Bronx Zoo.

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    1. There is an article from Gizmodo.com. Just appeared on my phone. Do not look for these article. Anyway, this article pissed me off. Said that kids growing up with cats can possibly cause schizophrenia. Not sure if i spelled that correctly. Please read article. Next thing i will hear is that cats caused world war 2.

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      1. Yeah there have been a lot of articles about it over the past week or so.

        I feel comfortable reading the behavioral research and the junk studies on feline ecological impact, but medical/psychological stuff is way above my pay grade. I’m not qualified to have an opinion on it and I don’t have anything useful to add to the discussion at this point.

        Maybe I can connect with a subject matter expert or one of the authors of the study to shed more light on whether people really need to worry.

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    2. No need to. I think it is bs. Any woman i know that was pregnant never cleaned the litterbox in regard to taxoplasmosis issue. Husband did. And the two pregnant women are in a medical field. I told told them about article and they also thought it was bs. One is my friend who did cat rescue with me.

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      1. How could they know it’s BS if they haven’t read the study?

        It’s a review of data that records rates of schizophrenia among cat owners vs the general population.

        The authors don’t draw any conclusions. In fact they state clearly that the data does not say why cat owners have higher rates of schizophrenia, and caution that we need more research to understand the link.

        So they’re saying all the right things. It’s important to distinguish between what the press reports and what the scientists are actually saying. They’re often very different.

        A good example is that breathless story claiming a Japanese scientist doubled cat lifespans with his discovery revealing certain mechanisms in feline immune systems fail.

        In reality the scientist didn’t make that claim or anything like it. The writer of the story vastly overstated the situation, reporting that cats will live to 30 thanks to the scientist’s discoveries and treatment when in reality cats born in the future *might* live longer in some cases, if they are treated with shots that don’t exist yet, eat a high protein, high quality diet, and are well taken care of.

        Data can’t be discredited with anecdotes and it’s important for us to understand the situation even if we don’t like what we’re hearing. *Especially* when we don’t like what we’re hearing. That way we can find a solution and hopefully mitigate the risks. I don’t think there’s any danger of people suddenly dumping cats.

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    1. You’re in Queens, yeah? So far Flaco hasn’t ventured beyond Manhattan and Central Park still seems to be his “home.” He avoided the area for more than a week when the marathon was happening, but then returned.

      Unfortunately I was not able to include photos of the people who assemble to watch Flaco, as they were all copyrighted photos taken by AP and local newspapers, but he does draw quite a crowd!

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      2. This is just an opinion on two doctors that i know. I sent them the article. Cats owners with children. They rolled thier eyes. They said could be true but pretty soon cats will be linked to other ailments. When these two doctors children were born pediatricians told them to get rid of cats. But that is pretty much told to most pregnant women. My friend who is in cat rescue told me i should of seen her husbands face!! If looks can kill. Taxoplasmosis is dangerous. No disputing that.

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      1. I was watching an episode of Charmed the other day that had an owl as a special guest. He squeaked just like The Kid does. Brandon was right next to the TV at the time and even woke up at one point. Probably thought “Who’s that talkin’ smack?” lol

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      3. He’s 7 months. Ramses still has the upper hand in their relationship, but Brandon’s purrrsonality is developing. Discovered he’s a MANIAC when it comes to food. He turns into the Tasmanian Devil.

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      4. I just saw Nature on PBS on owls. Nothing more beautiful on the planet.Owl was trying to get mouse underneath ground. That is why i was confused about Flacco feeding himself. Owls have very acute hearing and rats all over the place.

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      5. Yeah some species can even prey on cats. They are adept hunters.

        They have owl cafes in Tokyo just like they have cat cafes, which I thought was weird but the Japanese are known for being weird.

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      6. One year I found a great horned owl tangled up in my rooster’s coop. I had to push his claws out of the chicken wire and he wasn’t best pleased, but he got free. He or she – I think females are bigger than the males – was enormous. So were the claws and the snapping beak.

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  5. Wow, what a gorgeous bird! I saw one once out a window on a cloudy day, many years ago. Sitting upright in a tree and about a foot and a half long. I may have figured out the species and written it down then but can’t recall now. This was in a forest. Even there I think it’s unusual to see them in the day. Beautiful, but I think the large ones will prey on cats.

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    1. Probably a great horned owl which I believe is the most widespread species in the US. They’re in the same genus as the Eurasian eagle-owl, so if Flaco finds a mate it’ll probably be a great horned owl.

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    1. That’s interesting, I didn’t even know about him but I just looked him up and wiki says he had a mate who disappeared on or around 9/11. If it wasn’t the collapsing buildings that got her, it could have been the dust, fumes, fire, pieces of nearby buildings falling off. Everyone knows the towers collapsed but other buildings did too and it was madness. That pit is still hard to believe and I saw it with my own eyes.

      Anyway I like these stories of wild and unusual animals surviving in cities. They’re sad in a way, but also something to appreciate and marvel at. I doubt there will ever be another P-22 making a home in Los Angeles, and Flaco’s case is unique too.

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