#flaco nyc

[herpsandbirds]

Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl that escaped the central park zoo has died in apparent building collision. It is a dark day.

:C

I was really rooting for him. This is a really sad time for all of us.

RIP FLACO !!!

Flaco, the Eurasian Eagle Owl (Bubo bubo), male, family Strigidae, order Strigiformes, species found across much of Eurasia

photograph via: Manhattan Bird Alert

photograph by JACQUELINE EMERY

photograph by David Barrett 

Read more about Flaco the Owl:

Death of Flaco, NYC’s Celebrity Owl, Calls Attention to Bird Strikes - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

Central Park's Flaco had a family. Conservationists fear other owls will become targets for release. - Gothamist

Flaco the owl dies after colliding with a New York building | AP News

[octavio-world]

rip flaco, you were too good for this world

[regal-ls]

[emotiondelivered]

[agnesdelmotte]

flaco, illuminated by a sunset

photo david lei

[daisylovesrumble]

Flaco the Owl’s Year of Freedom From the Central Park Zoo - The New York Times

“I admire Flaco because he had a big dream, he believed in himself and he followed his heart,” Big Bird, a longtime Manhattanite, said in an email. “Flaco, if you ever read this, I hope you’ll fly on over to Sesame Street for a visit. My nest is your nest!”

[transparentgentlemenmarker]

Flaco 12 ans est mort le 23 février 2024, ce hibou Grand-Duc où Eurasian eagle-owl du zoo de Central Park qui en était la mascotte. Il s'est enfui de son enclos vandalisé on l'aperçois sur l'un des plus hauts arbres de New York

Calicho Arevalo

Les messages et les fleurs abondaient au pied d’un chêne de Central Park après l’annonce de la mort de Flaco.

[conspiracyofcrazy]

Oh no! He escaped from the zoo and everyone lost their shit! The zookeepers were convinced he'd die. Specialist were brought in. Everyone who wasn't taking pictures of him was actively trying to recapture him.

At about the two week mark, the professionals gave him up for dead. They couldn't catch him and he would surely starve to death or get hit in traffic or die of a wild bird disease that he wasn't immune to. Or loneliness. He's never going to find a mate - his species is based thousands of miles away. Birds get lonely and sometimes it makes them so upset they die (is what I gleaned from reports at the time).

But Flaco seems to be very happy as a bachelor in Manhattan.

I for one welcome our new strygine overlord. :)

Backstory: This gentleman escaped from Central Park Zoo in March after his enclosure there was vandalized, and there was a lot of concern over whether or not he could/would survive out of captivity. Unconcerned by this, Flaco settled himself in a particular area of Central Park and spent all the spring, summer, and most of the fall eating large numbers of rats, and genially allowing himself to be photographed by an ever-growing cadre of bird paparazzi.

Then a few weeks ago, possibly irked by repeated mobbing by assorted hawks and corvids, Flaco took off from his normal haunts and went on a brief tour of apartment-building courtyards on the Lower East Side. Now he's on the Upper West Side, within sight of Central Park (so food's no problem, should he feel like heading back that way to hunt), and shouting for everybody to hear that he owns the place. The image above shows him on the water tower of an apartment building at 86th and CPW.

If you look back through the Manhattan Bird Alert and Above 96th Twitter feeds, you'll see many splendid pictures of him. He's a handsome lad, and it's good to see him thriving.

What's in his future? Hard to tell. (Though some people on Twitter are suggesting he should run for mayor.) He may head upstate at some point. But he may decide he's quite happy to be a Manhattanite. As a fellow one, I wish him very well. :)

[grrlscientist]

OMG, look what arrived in the mail, thanks to the incredible Kelsey & the good people at Lantern Publishing (i forgot it was on its way!)

50% of author's royalties go to Wild Bird Fund, a NYC charity i’ve supported for 10 years

[diabolicalrabbit]

(via R.I.P Flaco The Owl)

Find more at DiabolicalRabbit.Com 

[subaquatic-skyscraper]

RIP Flaco.

Escape artist of Central Park Zoo.

Icon of NYC.

[bigappledippedincaramel]

‘‘Twas the Night Before Christmas in New York City

❤️ I wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays, and cheers to Flaco’s first taste of Christmas in the city flying free ❤️ A reimagined version of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas—for Flaco 🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️ Two-hundred years ago this week, Clement Clarke Moore wrote “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” in the Chelsea neighborhood, where he lived on a sprawling estate and was the…

[julialundman]

“Flaco, the NYC Eagle-Owl”, 13”x13” watercolor and colored pencil on cream paper. My tribute to Flaco, who escaped his zoo enclosure and made his way over to Central Park. This painting will be on the online gallery website @everydayoriginal tomorrow, April 30th, available to purchase. Thanks for your consideration! 🩷🦉🩷

[grison-in-space]

Hey! Not trying to keep an annoying conversation going but I wanted to say I super appreciate your rebuttal on the ARA stuff, it was a really good clear summary. Particularly glad you brought up the "nothing with us without us" thing because that tendency in ARA circles to treat animal liberation as the Same Thing as liberating marginalised humans, who can speak for them-fucking-selves, is so upsetting and overtly dehumanising and it's really valuable to see that pointed out. It's also so connected to the move towards tankie or fascist rhetoric, because it so strongly relies on a paternalistic view of exploited people as passive recievers of harm and charity. Anyway sorry I'm a bit ill and rambly but I really appreciated the clarity of your takes is what I wanted to say.

No worries, the boundary I wanted to set was more "I'm not interested in repeating that I know full well what ARA ideology is and how that hooks into veganism, and I'm not a captive audience." I'm happy to have conversations, including with people I disagree with; I am not happy to have to repeatedly explain the same thing that has, again, been my consistent experience for nigh on twenty years of interacting with the community. This is not that, so. Thank you for the compliment.

The paternalism is such a huge factor. It reminds me very much of benevolent sexism (as opposed to hostile sexism), and rings all the same alarm bells. It really, really, really reminds me of the way Autism Speaks talks about autistic children and always has.

If animals don't have language (and they largely don't) and if they communicate in ways that might be non-intuituve to a human (and they often do), surely it's incumbent on us as humans to decode the meaning of the signals they are sending in order to understand how to ethically interact with one another. Communication, after all, can happen perfectly well in the absence of language. And yet.

There's also just so little understanding and interest in the reality of what the consequences of "freedom" for animals living in captivity actually are and can be; consider for example Flaco the eagle owl who escaped into NYC, as @why-animals-do-the-thing covered last year. For a species that is notoriously reliant on our social structures and learned skill sets to survive, you'd think we could handle this better. But I see an awful lot of animal rights activists who seem to think that successfully releasing animals into the wild—freeing them from human control—is just a matter of one heartwarming video where the animal steps out of the cage and immediately locks its new job as an independent forager into place. It isn't.

I am also just straight up not convinced that freedom in the sense of being on your own and able to do whatever you want is all that great. I have spent my entire life boldly going where no one has gone before. It kind of sucks, actually. On the other hand, as a neurodivergent person personally I do a lot of structuring my choices with an eye to Past Me pissing off Current Me because I know Future Me will appreciate it. I can devise my own structures to let me successfully do that ... or I can just outsource the enforcing to a third party with opinions, which is something I sometimes need to do badly enough to purchase and train an entire stupid dog about it, because asking other humans to do it is relationally expensive. Sometimes having external structures that keep me from doing dumb things when the impulses get me is good actually.

And I mean, I'm a biologist. I went a little viral here a few years ago for being silly and describing what acacia trees do to try to fight off their greatest enemy: the mighty but terrifying giraffe. I know how plants engage their agency as dramatically and persistently as any animal; they're just sessile, so they do everything without the ability to get up and go. They are, however, no less active or opinionated a participant in the ecological chaos of the world than any other kingdom. To say nothing of fungi! To live is, unless you have chloroplasts, to consume. And even an awful lot of chloroplast-bearing species engage in a little heterotrophy now and again.

So like. Why should I think that eating plants is necessarily any more ethical than eating animals? Why does ARA-driven veganism think that increasingly processed and modified diets that camouflage and hide our connection to our food as part of the natural world that, yes, we also live in? Why do we hide from the complexity and the small grief of life, the shadow of death that has to come for there to be any room to change? One day, I too will die, and something will consume me unless I choose instead to be consumed by fire itself. That's carbon, baby!

[agnesdelmotte]

flaco, eurasian eagle owl, central park, nyc

lights of north manhattan skyline in his eyes

photo david lei

[daisylovesrumble]

Flaco, Central Park Owl, Died With High Levels of Rat Poison in System - The New York Times

Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl whose escape from the Central Park Zoo and life on the loose captivated New York, had enough rat poison and pigeon virus in his system to kill him even if he had not died after apparently striking an Upper West Side building last month.