Inside Central Park Zoo’s effort to recapture Flaco the missing owl: dead rats, nets and long nights

At the edge of the Central Park Zoo, just past the more prominent penguins and seabirds, a small owl enclosure sits empty. A few brown feathers are the only sign of its previous occupant.

The massive Eurasian eagle owl, known as Flaco, has been loose since last Thursday night, when an unknown vandal allegedly cut through the stainless steel mesh of his cage. The suspect – or group of suspects – remains at large.

Flaco, meanwhile, has stayed tantalizingly close, spending most of the last six days perched atop nearby trees in Central Park, seemingly oblivious to the scores of New Yorkers who come to check on him daily. Many experts worry that the owl, who has lived in the zoo since 2010, cannot survive in the park on his own.

Despite his close proximity, bringing Flaco home has proved challenging. Owls, which are skittish, unpredictable and easily distracted, can be notoriously hard to catch, particularly in dense urban environments.

Staff members with the Wildlife Conservation Society, which oversees most of the city’s zoos, have kept a round-the-clock watch on Flaco since his escape. On recent nights, zoo employees have attempted to lure the bird to the ground with his favorite meal – dead rats – while standing nearby with handheld nets, according to several workers.

Still, Flaco has remained elusive. On Tuesday night, he returned to the grounds of the zoo, making a brief appearance in the crane enclosure before flying off, according to a wildlife photographer, David Lei. On Wednesday, he sat preening himself on a tree beside the Wollman Rink, unresponsive to the rodent pile.

“We are stressed and frustrated and tired,” said one employee, who requested anonymity because all zoo workers have been ordered not to speak to the press. “People have been up all day and night.”

A spokesperson for the Wildlife Conservation Society, which has not shared an official statement since Friday, declined repeated requests for comment.

In the face of exhaustion, others have clung to wishful thinking. One zoo employee told Gothamist they believed Flaco had stayed nearby in order to be within earshot of the Delacorte Clock, his iconic neighbor, whose twirling menagerie lets out a twice-hourly chime.

Another described the vandal as an “a--hole,” and wondered why the police had not yet caught the person – or persons – who set him free. An NYPD spokesperson provided a report of “an unknown individual(s) [who] damaged an owl enclosure and an owl escaped.” The investigation is ongoing.

Some of the zoo's visitors expressed more complicated feelings about Flaco’s getaway. A pair of British tourists, who declined to give their names for fear of offending zoo employees, noted the relatively small nature of the enclosure – about the size of a bus stop, with a backdrop of painted mountains and a river – and wondered if he wasn’t better off inside the park.

Anthony Almojera, a paramedic with the FDNY who was at the zoo to see the penguins, said he understood the impulse to help the captive animals, but saw the idea of vandalism as misguided.

“You’d be better off donating money,” he said, adding, “you can’t help it when you come to the zoo to turn back into a 10-year-old.”

Raptor experts agree that Flaco’s odds of surviving outside the zoo are not high. But while he has not been observed eating, the owl’s substantial size – his wingspan exceeds 6 feet – means he can go weeks without food, according to Karla Bloem, the executive director of the International Owl Center.

“They have the deck stacked in their favor in being very large,” Bloem said. “If it takes them a few weeks to get good at hunting, they can probably survive that.”

In some cases, once-captive Eurasian eagle owls have become impressive hunters – such as Gladys, an escapee from the Minnesota Zoo who was spotted on a residential roof several weeks after her disappearance, clutching what appeared to be a dead cat. Sadly, Gladys was fatally struck by a car a few days later.

Flaco, who was seen wandering Fifth Avenue on the night of his escape, also faces the threat of Midtown traffic. And if he does begin hunting, the possibility of ingesting a poisoned rat is another serious concern, according to Suzanne Shoemaker, the director of the Owl Moon Raptor Center in Maryland.

“Its likelihood of survival would not be too great in a city, especially with rodenticides,” said Shoemaker. “There’s a lot of hazards out there.”

And so, with each night, the rescue operation takes on a growing urgency.

If the nets and rats and chimes of the spinning clock don’t work, Bloem offered another idea, one that she said was previously used to capture a Barred Owl that escaped from a nature center in Minnesota: “Basically, they got a Super Soaker and filled it with soapy water and squirted the owl until it couldn't fly well. Then they captured it.”

“Probably best reserved for warm weather,” she added.