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You are here: Home / Nature & Respite / Nature / Requiescat in pace, Flaco (Junk Food’ll Kill Ya)

Requiescat in pace, Flaco (Junk Food’ll Kill Ya)

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New York City has always had a soft spot for a louche European with a reputation as an apex predator… Although, actually, Flaco was born (at a captive bird park) in North Carolina. He lived twelve years in a small enclosure, and might’ve lived another forty there, but thirteen years is a good lifespan for eagle owls in the wild even in their natural habitat. Per the Washington Post:

After Flaco the owl escaped a vandalized cage at the Central Park Zoo and became a local celebrity last year, animal experts warned the public of the risks the bird faced in the wild. On Monday [March 25th], the Wildlife Conservation Society, which oversees New York’s Central Park Zoo, announced that those hazards led to Flaco’s death.

Flaco died last month after an apparent collision with a building on the Upper West Side. A necropsy exam later revealed that at the time of his death, Flaco had a herpesvirus from eating feral pigeons and had consumed four rodenticides used for rat control, the Wildlife Conservation Society said in a statement.

Paul Calle, the Wildlife Conservation Society’s chief veterinarian, told The Washington Post that the virus, the rat poisons and the injuries Flaco suffered after flying into a building might have all contributed to the 13-year-old Eurasian eagle owl’s death.

“Sadly, they’re all things that we’ve seen in the past,” Calle said. “They’re kind of some of the risks that wildlife have when they live in the city.”

Flaco was transferred to the Central Park Zoo in 2010 after he was born at a North Carolina bird park. The owl lived there for nearly 12 years until someone cut the steel mesh of his exhibit in February 2023.

While zoo staff found Flaco and started tracking him, they were unable to capture him with bait and owl-call recordings. The New York Police Department posted on social media that Flaco even evaded officers. Zoo officials were initially worried the owl wouldn’t find food in the wild, but witnessed Flaco hunting and eating prey in Central Park within days of his escape…

The Wildlife Conservation Society said in a statement at the time that the person who damaged Flaco’s exhibit was “responsible for his death.” A spokesman for the New York Police Department told The Post on Tuesday that officers are still searching for the perpetrator.

Eurasian eagle owls, which are native to Europe, Asia and the Middle East, typically live for one or two decades in the wild and up to 60 years in captivity, said Jessica Wilson, the executive director of New York City Audubon, a group that protects wild birds…

Wilson told The Post that rodenticides can cause muscle weakness and hemorrhages when consumed by birds, and those side effects might have caused Flaco to fly into a building.

“The minute he flew out of the Central Park Zoo, he was presented with so many different threats — threats that wild birds face every day,” Wilson said. “And it was really just a matter of time before one or multiple of those threats did him in.”

Reader Interactions

20Comments

  1. 1.

    emjayay

    Well, he had fun for a year. Those things may have had something to do with him being disoriented, but birds fly into glass covered buildings or even large windows all the time. Vastly more of them die that way, not to mention by killer cats (cats have to be taught how to hunt, and feral cats are particularly good at it) than by what some people (OK, one) may refer to as “windmills.”

  3. 3.

    middlelee

    I so loathe and despise fucking humans.

    Setting free a bird who had never lived in the wild is not an act of kindness.

    It’s an act of stupidity.  Something humans are particularly good at.

  6. 6.

    Ohio Mom

    Wait, didn’t people import peregrine falcons to NYC to eat pigeons? As I recall, the “canyons” of tall buildings resemble the actual canyons they live in naturally. And of course, there are always plenty of pigeons to eat.

    Don’t those peregrine falcons also get sick from eating pigeons sick with herpervirus and maybe also inadvertently consuming rat poison?

    Do i have the energy and motivation to google this right now, probably not.

  7. 7.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @middlelee:

    Some word game I play once, a long time ago, had a category “Disney Villains.” One of them was “Man,” as in Bambi. That has remained lodged in my mind for all these years. Flaco’s story just chews me up.

  9. 9.

    satby

    @Ohio Mom: The answer to birds getting sick from rat poison is yes, so does anything that eats the mice or rats that consume the poison, including cats and dogs. And birds fly into windows often because the window reflects the outdoors and looks like an opening to fly through.

    The Audubon Society has a program during bird migration season to try to reduce bird /building fatalities. Lots of cities take part. Lots more should be. Maybe it can become a Flaco memorial.

  11. 11.

    Eyeroller

    @Ohio Mom: Peregrines rarely eat mammals.  They are very specialized as bird predators.  There are several avian herpesviruses and some are pretty uniformly lethal, but others are not.  CoHV-1 seems to be most widespread in pigeons and their predators, and its lethality seems to be variable.  On the other hand, eagle-owls in the wild mostly eat mammals.  (The great horned owl is a member of the same genus.)  Rat poison is usually a blood thinner that causes them to bleed to death, or it may be a neurotoxin. An urban area is not a good habitat for an eagle-owl.

    Peregrines weren’t imported to eat pigeons but, if they were imported and didn’t find their way on their own (also too lazy to google now) it was to help save the species.  They were very impacted by DDT and were on the verge of extinction.

  12. 12.

    satby

    OT, but Terri Kanefield has a post up on her blog talking about misinformation and conspiracy theories peddled on the so-called liberal side of cable news. It grew out of the incediary reaction some of her commenters had to the Ronna Romney McDaniel hiring and firing at NBC/MSNBC.

    Why the conspiracy thinking and elevated rhetoric in what I’ve been calling the MSNBC-CNN-left-leaning media bubble is getting worse

    I see a lot of what she’s describing happening here, too. In comments and front page posts.

  13. 13.

    Ohio Mom

    @satby: My vague memory is that encouraging the peregrine falcons to settle in NYC was seen as a conservation victory, which seems weird if living in the city is so dangerous. It was quite a while ago so maybe they hadn’t considered all the downsides.

    A number of years ago there was a robin’s nest near our family room window and (I assume it was) the dad kept crashing into the window to scare that other bird away. After we figured out what was going on, we put up a big piece of cardboard over the window to block reflections.

  15. 15.

    Sister Inspired Revolver of Freedom

    Maybe it’s time NYC took a hard look at how it deals with its rodent & vermin problems, & find different poisons that will still kill the vermin, while leaving the wildlife & cats & dogs alone. Not a small ask, I do realise.

    Hail and Farewell Flaco! Free at last.

  18. 18.

    Anne Laurie

    @Eyeroller: Peregrines weren’t imported to eat pigeons but, if they were imported and didn’t find their way on their own (also too lazy to google now) it was to help save the species. They were very impacted by DDT and were on the verge of extinction.

    IIRC, captive-born peregrines were released in NYC & later in other cities starting in the 1970s.  As you say, they were on the verge of going extinct in the wild, because ingesting DDT made their eggshells too thin for fledglings to survive.  DDT was much more widely used in the country than in NYC’s urban canyons… and I don’t think avian herpesviruses were well studied at the time, even if specialized scientists knew about them.  (There *was* some debate about whether poisoned pigeons would kill peregrines, but there was already a movement to stop poisoning city pigeons… )

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