The New Yorker:

The Eurasian eagle-owl lived for a year outside captivity, learning to hunt and travelling widely in Manhattan. “I felt like I lost a friend,” one birder said.

By Naaman Zhou

The life of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo, and who died this past Friday outside a building on the Upper West Side, can be divided into two main chapters. Chapter 1 spanned nearly thirteen years, mostly in the zoo—first in the Temperate Territory near the snow leopards and red pandas, and later opposite the loud chiming of the Delacorte Clock. The second started when Flaco spotted a hole in his cage, evidently made by a vandal, and departed. Flaco, who’d been born in captivity and whose species is not native to North America, swooped and roosted in Central Park, taught himself how to hunt—stunning scientists—and lived more than a year on his own before wildlife rescuers found him unresponsive after an apparent collision with a building on West Eighty-ninth Street.

Flaco was not especially famous inside the zoo. Outside, he was adored. I first encountered Flaco three weeks after his escape. Each day, near sunset, a small thicket of people, members of Manhattan’s birding community, could be found stalking through the park with long lenses, night- and heat-vision goggles, and thousands of dollars’ worth of other equipment, loving him from a distance. David Barrett, who runs the account Manhattan Bird Alert, on Twitter, posted Flaco updates with the urgency of a breaking-news reporter. The crowd around Flaco grew. The bird was enormous and mysterious, and people liked that he ate rats. In an unscientific poll conducted by the local news Web site Hell Gate, nearly everyone viewed Flaco more favorably than the city’s current mayor, Eric Adams, and the former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. (“He’s the man,” one respondent said, of the owl.)

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