It’s been more than a week since I read the news and I can still hardly believe it. Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped the Central Park Zoo and spent a year on the lam in Manhattan, is dead. My disbelief is of a piece with the grief I feel at news of an unexpected human death. How can a vibrant, irreplaceable creature be safely here among us one instant and irretrievably gone the next? How is that even possible?
The truth is that Flaco never had a chance. Few apex predators fare well in the built human environment, and Flaco was an apex predator who had never been taught to hunt. Until someone freed him from the zoo last year, he had spent his entire life in a cage.
He learned to hunt anyway, as a wild owl in the urban unwild. All New York was rooting for him — and, thanks to the reach of social media, many others were too. I live in Tennessee, but I began to follow the wonderful urban wildlife photographer David Lei on Instagram just for the pure joy of seeing Flaco, day after day, in all his ill-fated magnificence. He was our outlaw, our tragic hero, our symbol of resilience, our fellow bewildered immigrant, determined to master the perplexities of life in a foreign place.
Flaco had spent his life among our kind and seemed to be as curious about us as we were about him. He perched on fire escapes and air-conditioners. He peered into windows, blinking those huge, inscrutable eyes. In his glorious wildness, he tolerated our oohs and ahs, our long lenses, our honking taxis and our double-decker buses and our wailing sirens. Somehow he found his way among our glass-clad canyons, navigated the inexplicable patterns of our traffic and our days.
Flaco knew us. He felt like a friend.
But there were things he did not know about our kind. The rats he killed and ate, to human cheers? He didn’t know they were laced with poison. The windows he peered into? He didn’t know they could, in certain light, give back the sky and the street trees. He didn’t know that reflections in glass aren’t real trees or the real sky.
A Eurasian eagle-owl far from his native habitat is not alone in failing to understand the dangers of life in an urban environment. Up to two billion birds die from window strikes every year, some quarter of a million in New York City alone.
There is no way to know how many animals die from eating prey laced with poison. Before poison kills its target, it makes them easier for predators to catch. When urban predators eat rats — or mice or chipmunks or squirrels or voles — who have been poisoned, they’re also consuming poison. It might not kill them right away, either, but it makes them weak, disoriented, vulnerable to pathogens.
Nearby residents reported that Flaco had stopped calling in the days before his death, but he was still alive when the superintendent at a Manhattan apartment building found him in the courtyard and called for help. Despite the rapid response of staff members from the Wild Bird Fund, a nonprofit wildlife rescue group, Flaco didn’t make it. Initial findings suggest that he died of “acute traumatic injury.”
In some ways, this explanation is no explanation at all. The report found trauma mainly to the bird’s body, not to his head, as would be expected in a building strike. “This is not the story of a bird that flew into a window,” wrote Barry Petchesky for the Defector; “this appears to be the story of a bird who fell from his perch and died from smashing into the ground.”
It will take weeks for a full necropsy by the Wildlife Conservation Society to be complete, and even then we may never know exactly why Flaco died. Did he fall from a high perch, or did he fly into the building? Was he confused by a window’s reflection? Did he bleed to death from rat poison? Was his coordination affected by the high levels of lead in New York City pigeons, which he had lately begun to hunt? Was he sick with an illness like West Nile virus or avian influenza?
In the end, though, it’s clear that we were Flaco’s undoing, just as it’s clear that we will be the undoing of all the other magnificent wild creatures who have no choice but to try to live among us. “In essence, they probably will all die from human interference, from things we’ve done,” Rita McMahon, director of the Wild Bird Fund, told Catrin Einhorn of The Times.
This is a hard truth to accept, especially when you know that these deaths are not inevitable. There are reasonable, data-supported measures that any city could adopt to reduce human-animal conflict and allow wildlife to live more safely among us. We aren’t powerless in the face of this suffering.
There are many ways to reduce bird strikes, for example. Requiring bird-safe design in building remodels and new construction, and treating windows in existing buildings to make glass more visible to birds, would prevent the majority of bird strikes during the day. Birds migrate primarily at night and can be profoundly disoriented by artificial lights; turning off nonessential lighting can make a great difference in their safety. Setting lights to turn on only when triggered by motion detectors and installing hoods that direct illumination toward the ground can also help, particularly during the fall and spring migration seasons.
In New York State, the Dark Skies Protection Act and the Bird Safe Buildings Act, two bills currently languishing in committee, would help to address both of the primary reasons for bird strikes. In a renewed push to bring attention to this issue following Flaco’s death, the Bird Safe Buildings Act has been renamed the Flaco Act.
Finding safer alternatives to rodenticides in densely urban environments is a taller order, but it’s possible. Consistently keeping garbage contained in rat-proof bins, closing off access points to human dwellings and setting traps are all elements of effective rat-management programs. Better rat traps do exist, and they kill more humanely than poison does. And the collateral damage to birds and other wildlife is much reduced.
But none of these measures will work without a fundamental shift in the way we think about animals. As human populations grow and the built environment expands — each in concert with the ravages of climate change — protecting the creatures who share our ecosystems will become more difficult and more crucial. To protect the animals we love, we’ll need to think differently about the animals we do not love. To live peaceably among them, we’ll need to work harder to do what wildness requires of us.
Wild animals are not our enemies. They are our neighbors. Every owl is Flaco. Looked at through the lens of biodiversity loss, every toad and rabbit and squirrel and fox and coyote and goldfinch and cricket and lacewing and roly-poly — they could all be Flaco. We just need to learn to love them the way we loved him.
Margaret Renkl, a contributing Opinion writer, is the author of the books “The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year,” “Graceland, at Last” and “Late Migrations.”
