Admiration, And Anguish, As Central Park Owl Fans Flock To Flaco

UPPER EAST SIDE, NY — At about noon on Sunday, over 20 avid birders gathered with their binoculars and scopes and 20-pound camera lenses to try and get a peek at Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that unfortunately escaped its Central Park Zoo enclosure due to vandalism last Thursday.

The bird fans looked on, some for hours at a time, to appreciate the unique and beautiful bird, known for its striking orange eyes.

But after every word of admiration for Flaco’s beauty came the more tragic questions: Has he eaten? Are his wings strong enough to fly down? Does he even know how to roost in the wild?

Anke Frohlich, an avid birder, watched Flaco for a total of nearly 12 hours between Saturday and Sunday. She would have come on Friday, but she was actually already busy taking pictures of owls outside of the city.

Patch ran into Frohlich as she was leaving the crowd of birders.

“I’ve been here for six hours today,” she laughed, “I’ve had enough for now.”

Frohlich, like many other New York City birders, got hooked on bird photography during COVID, taking the trip to Central Park regularly from her apartment in the village, where she’s lived for 30 years.

“I’ve taken so many pictures of him,” she told Patch of her time with Flaco, “getting harassed by hawks, fluffing up, his orange eyes, sneezing.”

In an ornithological coincidence, Frohlich had just held an Eurasian eagle-owl this past summer back home in Germany at a falconry, where Flaco’s relatives are a well-known sight.

Frohlich thought it was funny that, after all the time she spent last summer in Germany looking for a wild eagle-owl to photograph, she found a captive one in the woods of Central Park.

“It’s amazing, but also tragic,” she said. “We want the owl to be safe first. The person who did this did not think this through,” Frohlich said of the vandal, “this is not in the owl’s best interest.”

Both the Central Park Zoo and the NYPD offered no updates when asked by Patch regarding both the rescue effort and the investigation into the vandalism that set off the tragic adventure, but reports on Monday hint that Flaco is keen to return to the zoo, with sightings of him moving closer toward his home.

Steven Harris and Debra Vilen, both professional photographers from Park Slope, had a pair of binoculars and the latest Nikon camera with a gigantic lens attached to it.

They’ve been birders for over 20 years, and as they pointed their glass towards the loose owl, a red-tailed hawk swooped overhead, eliciting gasps from the crowd.

“That was great,” Harris said, “that was worth coming here.”

Harris said it’s important for people to understand what’s going on with this particular bird and how it got here, and why so many people are interested in it — and excited to see it.

“At the same time,” he said, “it’s tragic because he’s escaped from the zoo because of a vandal, and that’s going to potentially put him in harm’s way.”

While the Zoo wouldn’t answer any questions about Flaco’s provenance, most of the birders understood that he had lived at the zoo for over a decade, where his food was fed to him, not hunted.

“He may die,” Harris said, “because he may not know how to feed himself.”

Harris and Vilen said that some more experienced birders suspect Flaco might actually be ok, that he may have hunted at night under the cover of darkness.

“So it's just this wait and see,” Harris said, “if he coughs up a pellet, then he's eating.”

Frohlich worries that if Flaco is secretly indulging in some of Central Park’s local delicacies, he might suffer the same fate of another beloved Central Park owl, Barry, who was struck and killed by a worker driving a Central Park Conservatory vehicle in 2021.

The beloved barred owl was discovered to have consumed a huge amount of rat poison which could have impaired her flight, poison most likely first consumed by the rodents she ate.

She also had been waiting for a pellet from Flaco. And wondered if he even had the wing muscle to fly much at all.

“He’s mimicking zoo life,” she said, “just sitting there.”

Steve Solnick, a birder for only a year, said there was definitely a sad side to the story, but as far as bird watching goes, he felt that Flaco could be considered a “watched” bird, since birders seek out wild birds exclusively.

“It’s a bit of an anomaly,” said Solnick, “because it was already here, in captivity.”

“It is wild now,” Solnick joked. “It’s a loophole.”