Like Many a Hero, Flaco the Owl Made His Choice

Flaco the owl is gone, but his life had all the elements of a classic hero’s story, not soon forgotten.

Born in captivity, he lived a dozen years in a comfortable cage in the Central Park Zoo where little happened and less was needed. His was a safe existence. But it was also a life without agency. Then, a little over a year ago, someone released him.

On Friday, when he died of acute traumatic injury, perhaps from a collision with a Manhattan apartment building’s glass windows, his death offered us a chance to reckon with the question at the heart of many a hero’s journey: Can we put a price on freedom? Flaco’s liberation from his comfortable confinement came at a cost — he spent the final year of his life free, but threatened from all sides by a booming city. Was it worth it?

Almost from the moment he was released, Flaco became a symbol of hope for many of the people who followed his story and recognized parts of themselves in him. Some saw him as the embodiment of the American dream, an outsider who had come to Manhattan and made a life for himself here, like millions of others who arrived penniless and unconnected in their quest for freedom. Others saw him as a poignant reminder that you can find happiness even if you’re alone (as the only free-living Eurasian eagle-owl in the Western Hemisphere, he had no chance of ever finding a wild mate).

As a result, as he flew around the city, landing on rooftops and crosswalks from the East Village to the Upper West Side, we were terrified that he’d succumb to the dangers of city life. Flaco had no experience living outside a cage, and New Yorkers initially doubted his chances of survival. We worried that he’d eat a rat with enough poison in its system to kill him. (After Barry, the wild barred owl, was killed by a maintenance truck in 2021, a necropsy showed that she had ingested so much rodenticide that it might have compromised her agility.) And we worried about his chances with oncoming traffic.

On Christmas Day, The Wall Street Journal even issued a stern command: “Capture Flaco.” “If he remains free,” one of the paper’s editors wrote, “rat poison or something worse will kill him.”