Sometime during the night of February 2, 2023, someone cut a hole in the steel mesh of the cage of a Eurasian eagle owl in the Central Park Zoo.
When he escaped that night, the owl, named Flaco, could barely fly, but over the next year he regained the skills that evolution had granted him, flying in graceful swoops and feasting on rats while making Central Park, and later the whole of New York City, his territory. Along the way he gained thousands of followers in the park, who thrilled to his adventures and mourned when he died, on February 23, 2024, a little more than a year after his escape.
I happened to be in New York on the day of Flaco’s death, and having written extensively about birds in books, I began to consider the possibility of writing one about Flaco. Over the next six months, I would learn everything I could about eagle owls in general and Flaco in particular, interviewing dozens of birders and owl experts, and eventually even flying to Finland to see eagle owls in the wild.
Writing books requires a certain obsessiveness, and when you are fully immersed in the process, particularly in a work of nonfiction, it sometimes feels like you have become a character in your own narrative. And it is then, when you are absorbed in a story, that coincidences sometimes rain down, coincidences that you would be too embarrassed to include if what you were writing were fiction.
I experienced this sort of serendipity on April 22, 2024, two months after Flaco’s death. I had decided to walk from the south end of Central Park to the north, touring many of Flaco’s haunts during his year of freedom.
It was still dark, an hour before dawn, when I reached the tulip tree in front of the Plaza hotel and Bergdorf Goodman, the tree where Flaco had spent his first free night after escaping from the zoo and flying down Fifth Avenue. My next stop was the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, a wooded area inside the park and Flaco’s home during his first free days. There, he had been dive-bombed by a red-tailed hawk and observed and photographed by dozens of people who stared up at him through binoculars or telephoto lenses.
I headed north to the Literary Walk, the promenade between noble, late-blooming elms and the scene of some of Flaco’s earliest explorations amid the statues of Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott. The park had changed for me, and for many others, thanks to Flaco, taking on a mythic quality, a storybook place like the Hundred Acre Wood.
Next, I entered the Ramble, the wildest part of the park. Up to that point I hadn’t seen a single person, except for a homeless man asleep on a bench, but as I walked deeper into the Ramble, I saw someone walking toward me. I noticed that he had the same type of binoculars that I did, a bird-watcher, maybe, and so I said hello and asked him the logical questions: Did he know about Flaco? Had he ever seen him?
He said that, yes, he did; yes, he had.
In fact, he was there the very night that Flaco escaped.
He told me his name was Edmund Berry, and then he told me the story of that night, how he had seen an X alert about a strange sidewalk owl on Fifth Avenue, how he had rushed to see him and taken one of the first pictures of the bird after his escape.
“He was sitting on the sidewalk with the police and crowds around him,” he said. “They placed the cat carrier next to the bird, trying to capture him, but Flaco just stared at it.”
The rest of the onlookers dispersed after Flaco flew south, but Berry thought, I can’t go. So he followed Flaco as the owl flew down toward the Plaza and Bergdorf Goodman, where I had started my morning. It was a cold and windy night, but Berry just stood staring up at the owl, transfixed.
He watched the owl for an hour, then another. He thought, Well, I’m just gonna stay here. I don’t know what else I can do that’s as awesome as this.
“I couldn’t leave,” Berry told me. “It took hold of me. It eventually took hold of everybody. I just had to watch him. And the whole city soon came to the same realization: We can’t go. We have to stay. We have to watch and see what happens.”
After we said good-bye, I thought about how strange it was to have run into Berry. But also how perfect.
Berry had been the first, but he had been followed by hundreds—thousands, really—of others who had been lucky enough to have Flaco come into their lives. To be lifted out of the ordinary.
Who wouldn’t want that? Who doesn’t hunger for unexpected encounters beyond ourselves? Don’t we all want to touch a world outside our own? To reach out of our caged world and touch a wilder one?
David Gessner is the author of 14 books and a professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. In 2017, he hosted the National Geographic Explorer documentary “The Call of the Wild”
