The Ballad of Flaco, the Outlaw who learned to fly

New Yorkers rallied again when the Central Park Zoo tried to capture Flaco and circulated a petition to release the bird. And when Flaco mastered the art of hunting and flying, says Penny Lane, people saw that he “essentially became an owl.” They followed an increasingly confident Flaco on his travels from Central Park to the East Village to Riverside Drive. And as David Barrett noted, Flaco had soon “extended his territory to include much of Manhattan,” honking loudly from the top of 20-story buildings to proclaim his freedom.

At the same time, obsessed Flaco fans scoured the internet to find out more about his past hatched on March 15, 2010 in the Sylvan Heights Bird Park in Scotland Neck, NC He apparently had younger and older siblings named Gertrude, Salazar, Stan, Morrisey, Boston, and Thatcher; and its parents, Xena and Watson, were the offspring of Martina and Sinbad, and Nyra and Ezra, respectively – owls who their lineage back to Eurasian eagle owls from Europe. The noted German-born photographer Anke Frohlich that some New Yorkers identified with Flaco as a fellow immigrant, another outsider learning to live as “a stranger in a strange land.”

New Yorkers have a long love affair with owls and embrace the bird as a traditional symbol of wisdom. There is a little owl hidden on Columbia University's Alma Mater statue, and many early 20th century public schools featured owl sculptures—notably PS 110, the Florence Nightingale Schoolof which there were about two dozen owl statues sat on his roof.

In recent years, New Yorkers no longer had to rely on fake owls for their regular owl fix. At the height of the pandemic, a series of real owls appeared and brought residents out of their Covid hibernation into the restorative atmosphere of Central Park. Barry the barred owl landed in Manhattan in October 2020. She was followed by a young snowy owl who visited Central Park in January 2021 and a year later by Geraldine the great horned owl, who was doing well in the park despite an injured foot.

However, none of these visitors captured the public imagination as much as Flaco and his story of transformation. The owl, once described by a frequent zoo visitor as a grumpy and slightly chubby bird, has reinvented itself as New York's most majestic bird of prey – the 'Prince of the City'. the dancer Heather Watts said itwhich has become a fascinating symbol of freedom, resilience and the possibility of innovation.

Michiko Kakutani is the author of the forthcoming book “The Great Wave: The Era of Radical Disruption and the Rise of the Outsider.”

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