Flaco the Eurasian eagle-owl gained a cult following after leaving his life in captivity at the Central Park zoo in 2023 and surviving, against all odds, for more than a year as a free bird in Manhattan.<\/p>\n
Birdwatchers tracked his every move<\/a>, capturing his vast wingspan and luminous orange eyes with their cameras. His fans got tattoos<\/a> in his honor. And now, Wild Inside, a new documentary chronicling Flaco\u2019s year about town, is set to premiere this week.<\/p>\n Penny Lane, who directed the documentary, said she felt compelled to tell the story of Flaco because, like so many other New Yorkers, she too found herself swept up in his magic. \u201cOwls are uniquely magical creatures,\u201d she said. \u201cThey\u2019re associated with other worlds, these mystical realms. So the appearance of a creature like that in New York<\/a> City \u2026 it feels like kind of a fairytale.\u201d<\/p>\n Flaco escaped from the zoo in February 2023, after someone deliberately cut the mesh of the enclosure where he lived for 13 years. Zoo staff and birdwatchers alike feared for his wellbeing. Flaco did not know how to hunt on his own. Observers noticed he had trouble flying. Attempts to lure him back with live lab rats were unsuccessful.<\/p>\n But eventually, he figured it out. Local birders documented him successfully hunting and eating some of the city\u2019s many rats. And after two weeks, zoo officials suspended their efforts to recapture him. Flaco had done the impossible: he had learned to be wild again, in perhaps one of the wildest environments of all \u2013 the concrete jungle of New York City. \u201cAs the saying goes, if you can make it here, you\u2019ll make it anywhere,\u201d one news anchor quipped in a news segment about the owl.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Lane sought to capture Flaco\u2019s wild fairytale magic in the film, interspersing interviews with awestruck New Yorkers celebrating each Flaco sighting with whimsical background music and dreamy visuals. She spoke to New Yorkers from all walks of life who projected their own experiences on to the owl that triumphed, calling him a survivor and hailing him as another immigrant success story (Eurasian eagle-owls are a non-native species). \u201cEvery New Yorker dreams of moving out of their tiny shitty apartment into a nicer neighborhood and Flaco did it,\u201d Seth Meyers joked in a Late Show monologue<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cNew Yorkers, we love an underdog,\u201d Lane laughed. But for the local birding community, Flaco\u2019s story went beyond that. \u201cWe were watching a zoo animal transform into a wild animal before our eyes,\u201d Lane said. Flaco\u2019s ability to revert back to instincts he never had to use in his life were raising questions over the true nature of wildness \u2013 and if it exists within all of us like it did for Flaco.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was born in captivity. His parents were born in captivity. His grandparents were born in captivity. As far back as I could trace, he was as close to a domesticated wild animal you could get in the sense that he was of a captive lineage,\u201d Lane said. \u201cBut he showed pretty quickly that he was not a domesticated animal.\u201d<\/p>\n But Flaco\u2019s story doesn\u2019t have a fairytale ending. Just over a year after his escape, Flaco crashed into a building on West 89th Street and died from the impact. A necropsy conducted on his body found that he had been weakened by pigeon herpes virus, which he caught from eating the pigeons that he hunted, as well as four kinds of anticoagulants that are common in the rodenticide used to kill rats \u2013 a common cause of death and illness for all wild birds that hunt rats in New York City.<\/p>\n Street art mural honoring Flaco in New York\u2019s Freemans Alley. Photograph: Bing Guan\/Reuters<\/p>\n \u201cI was devastated,\u201d Lane said. She had planned to film Flaco for the entirety of his life, thinking it would be for at least 10 more years. The birdwatchers and naturalists interviewed in the film grappled with questions of if Flaco would have been better off if he had never escaped the zoo at all \u2013 no longer free, but alive and safe. \u201cYou can\u2019t help but feel guilty and implicated,\u201d Lane said. \u201cYou loved seeing him so much, but you knew in the back of your mind all the while that this was not a safe place for him.\u201d<\/p>\n