From NY Historical Museum

Flaco the Eurasian eagle-owl captured the hearts of New Yorkers from the moment he escaped the Central Park Zoo until his death in February 2024. Many saw him as a symbol of freedom and, given the odds of survival stacked against him, as a true New Yorker embodying pluck and resilience. The Year of Flaco looks back at the year the raptor took to Manhattan’s skies, learned to hunt, and peered into apartment windows.

In addition to photographs and video, this exhibition features letters, drawings, and objects left at a memorial beneath Flaco’s favorite oak tree. It also examines the dangers faced by birds in the urban environment, the legislation inspired by Flaco’s death, and what we can do to be better neighbors to the animals in our midst. A special related installation in the Audubon’s Birds of America Focus Gallery showcases owls, primarily those found in New York.

I’m going to have to try to get to see this. If you’ll be in NYC from Feb 7 - June 6, you can see some of the tributes to the owl that captivated the country with its bittersweet journey.

I do hope they put a statue of him by his favorite roosting tree in Central Park as many have asked for. We could also ban the second-generation rat poison that killed him, but the statue is probably more likely as it’s the lesser of two inconveniences.

  • anon6789OP
    9•21 days ago

    From NY Times

    ‘The Year of Flaco’ Will Celebrate a Beloved Owl New York Historical is opening an exhibit of memorabilia of the eagle-owl, who died in February

    In life, Flaco got the celebrity treatment. In death, he is getting the museum treatment.

    The New York Historical (as the New-York Historical Society has called itself since last fall) will open an exhibition titled “The Year of Flaco” on Feb. 7. It will celebrate the beloved Eurasian eagle-owl that winged it in Manhattan, hunting and holing up in a favorite tree. His fans worried about the dangers of the city, including a diet that was apparently heavy on tainted prey. When he died after crashing into an apartment building last year, he had enough rat poison and pigeon virus in his system to kill him.

    Rebecca Klassen, the curator of material culture at New York Historical, said it was unusual to assemble an exhibition so soon after the central subject had died. And New York Historical does not have Flaco’s remains, only memorabilia. His wings and tissue samples went to the American Museum of Natural History.

    The idea for New York Historical’s exhibit came up after Valerie Hartman, a runner who had kept tabs on Flaco, filled out an online form for the museum’s “History Responds” initiative. That program was started after the Sept. 11 attacks to collect material related to major events. Klassen read the form and offered to go to Hartman’s apartment to inspect Flaco memorabilia that she and another Flaco fan had collected after a memorial gathering in Central Park last year.

    Without telling Klassen, Hartman invited three other Flaco fans.

    “They were basically pitching me on the idea of doing an exhibition timed to the anniversary of his escape and his death,” Klassen said.

    Hartman said she had not meant to “ambush” Klassen at the gathering last June, not quite two months after Flaco’s death.

    “My first priority was the material should survive and be archived and accessible,” Hartman said. “I didn’t have an agenda to do an exhibit, but in talking about why these materials should be saved, it lit a spark of wow, this is an ongoing story. People were still grieving. What would it be like to have an exhibit where people could see the photography, combine that with the poems and letters and stuffed animals and trinkets?”

    Klassen remembers her response: “I said, ‘Well, OK, this is a very short timeline for a museum.”

    But she felt that capitalizing on Flaco’s enduring popularity made sense. “He’s such a flexible symbol,” she said. “People see all these things in him — a New Yorker who had grit, an immigrant — and he was liberated, he was free. That idea was very potent for people. And he was a raptor. Raptors have a hold on people. You can imagine how people felt when this large raptor appeared on your window sill. You’re going about your day, and this large, beautiful bird appeared.”

    “I miss him dearly,” she said.

    She said she had been trained as an archaeologist and had seen the Eurasian eagle-owl in its native habitat, hunting.

    She compared Flaco to Patrick Henry, the colonial-era patriot remembered for his “give me liberty or give me death” speech. Flaco “really chose liberty” when he broke out of the zoo, she said. “He repeatedly dodged capture” when the zookeepers tried lure him back.

    But no, she said: “He wanted to remain free.”