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The story of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from New York City's Central Park Zoo and captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of followers around the world.
This is a parable of freedom, wildness, and our urban ecosystems. Flaco has been dubbed "the world's most famous bird". From the night in February of 2023 when vandals cut a hole in his cage until his death a year later in a courtyard on the Upper West Side, his is a story full of adventure and unexpected turns.
Nature writer David Gessner chronicles the year-long odyssey of Flaco and the human drama that followed the owl who captured the imaginations of New Yorkers and people around the world. Though he'd spent his life in a cage, Flaco learned to survive in New York City by eating rats, squirrels, and birds. He was an immigrant coming from elsewhere to make it in the big city. Central Park, the island of green in an urban sea, was his new home territory.
Flaco's urban adventure brought controversy, pitting those who felt he should be returned to the safety of the zoo against those who created the "Free Flaco" movement. The birding world was fractured over the ethics of the online sharing of his location that brought scores of enthusiasts to view him each day. And his end – with a grim necropsy revealing Flaco had suffered a viral infection from eating pigeons and had multiple rodenticides in his system – serves as a Rachel Carson-esque warning about the harm we've done to our urban environments, inspiring the passage of long-sought legislation protecting urban birds and regulations meant to reduce the use of rodenticides in New York City.
David Gessner is the author of thirteen books that blend a love of nature, humour, memoir, and environmentalism, including the New York Times bestselling All the Wild That Remains. Gessner is a professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he also founded the literary magazine Ecotone. His own magazine publications include pieces in the New York Times Magazine, Outside, Orion, and many other magazines. In 2017 he hosted the National Geographic Explorer show, The Call of the Wild.
"For Flaco fans, birdwatchers and those interested in the threats facing our environment, The Book of Flaco promises to be a hoot."
– PEOPLE
"For one glorious year, it was Flaco's world, and we were just living in it. The world watched as a scrappy newcomer made New York his home, and we mourned his death even as we knew his freedom couldn't last. Fortunately, David Gessner came along to chronicle these events as they happened, and to conduct a post-mortem, as it were, on Flaco's flight to freedom, his rise to fame, and his inevitable downfall. The result is a wonderfully entertaining tribute to Flaco and everything he taught us about what owls are capable of, even in the urban chaos of Manhattan."
– Amy Stewart, author of The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession and The Drunken Botanist
"Gessner writes beautifully, with heart and honesty. This book is about an owl, sure, but more than that, it's about ourselves: about what we in our distracted, self-centric lives have lost and occasionally, in the unexpected presence of a wild creature, are lucky enough to regain. Like Flaco himself, this book is an inspiration, an invitation to step outside ourselves, to leave the cage, as it were, and connect to something pure and precious. Nature writing can have no worthier purpose."
– Mary Roach, author of Animal Vegetable Criminal: When Nature Breaks the Law
"The Book of Flaco is a charming, passionate ode to the world's most charismatic owl – and the latent wildness that we all harbor. Few birds touched as many human lives as this escaped Eurasian eagle-owl, and few writers have memorialized an animal as gracefully as David Gessner."
– Ben Goldfarb, author of Crossings and Eager
