In 2023 Flaco, a Eurasian Eagle Owl, escaped his enclosure at the Central Park Zoo. He inspired a flutter of media attention and a fanatic online flock until his death a year later. Flaco’s escape may have seemed like just another heartwarming animal story about a photogenic bird. But the new documentary Wild Inside reexamines the controversy surrounding the owl's brief tenure outside the zoo.
“People were really torn apart by this in a way that I’ve never seen in the birding community,” says Penny Lane, the film’s director. “Friendships fell apart over this.”
In the first moments of the film, Flaco is found on a New York City sidewalk, looking distressed and confused. Because he was raised in human care, he didn’t know how to hunt on his own and wasn’t expected to survive unless he was recaptured by the zoo. But miraculously, he began hunting his own rats and pigeons and taking shelter in the woods of Central Park. After two weeks, the zoo called off its rescue efforts, and the city (and some birders) cheered for the bird hero that overcame the odds.
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Many of the birders, experts and New York bystanders interviewed in Wild Inside seemed to see themselves in Flaco—an underestimated bird who quickly proved he could survive on his own in a harsh environment. As one newscaster put it in the documentary, “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.”
But the celebrations instantly drew criticism over anthropomorphism. We can’t prove animals understand human concepts such as “freedom,” so what is there to celebrate if Flaco didn’t belong in Central Park? Eurasian Eagle Owls are apex predators, and Flaco was a nonnative species that may have had a negative effect on the fragile Central Park ecosystem. Also, even though Flaco learned to hunt on his own, he still faced the same risks that any other wild raptor in New York City does: prey poisoned with lethal rodenticide. There were vocal critics who wanted Flaco to return to the zoo for his own safety and were shocked that the rescue efforts didn’t continue.
Flaco “was an unprepared individual who was tragically and carelessly thrown into one of the world’s most complex and dangerous environments, nearly 4,000 miles away from what would be his species’ natural habitat,” says Daniel Cone, assistant executive director of the World Bird Sanctuary, a rehabilitation and conservation organization, who was also interviewed in the documentary. Cone says he believes animals can experience emotions such as happiness, but there’s a problem when “emotions are projected onto ... a wild animal which the general public do not understand, leading to decisions that are harmful to the animal’s well-being or to the environment.”
Birders looking at Flaco in Central Park in Wild Inside.
Courtesy of Sandbox Films
And the documentary went deeper than just disagreements over Flaco’s welfare—it also investigated the circumstances that brought him to Central Park in the first place.
For one, Lane visited the World Bird Sanctuary’s captive breeding program for Eurasian Eagle Owls that hatched and raised Flaco and his siblings that are still living in zoos nationwide. “Specifically for the Eurasian Eagle Owl, this species experienced significant population declines throughout their European range in the 19th and 20th centuries,” Cone tells Scientific American. Human hunting was one of the factors behind the decline. “Zoos played a large role in protecting the species,” Cone adds, by breeding the birds to maintain genetic diversity.
Though the benefits of raising animals in captivity are appreciated, Wild Inside questions whether Flaco’s enclosure at the zoo met the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) standards for size. (When Scientific American asked Daniel Ashe, president and CEO of the AZA, for comment, he said, “To state or imply that the Central Park Zoo was not meeting AZA standards would be incorrect.”) Wild Inside presents interviews with owl researchers that highlight the birds’ intelligence and heightened senses, voicing their questions about what sufficient captive care would even look like.
Lane says that, behind the scenes in Wild Inside, there was tension between sources who leaned more on the “free Flaco” side of the equation and those who were in support of returning him to the zoo or some other form of captivity. Though all sides have been committed to animal welfare, different methods have occasionally put animal rights groups at odds with some researchers. Lane has made a point to say that neither the AZA nor the Central Park Zoo responded to her requests for comment. But “our policy is to be responsive because transparency benefits our members,” Ashe says, adding that he didn’t recall being contacted by Lane’s team. The Central Park Zoo did not respond to Scientific American’s request for comment.
“The controversy about what was best for Flaco was partly about values,” says Jeff Sebo, director of the Center for Environmental and Animal Protection and principal investigator of the Wildlife Inclusive Local Development (WILD) Lab at New York University. “When people value security more, they may see life in captivity as better for an animal like Flaco. And when they value freedom more, they might see life in the wild as better.”
Flaco’s story in the film expands into a meditation on worldwide conservation methods, the role of ambassador animals in places such as zoos and the realities that wild animals face when they live in urban environments. And in the film, as in real life, there isn’t one clear answer as to what mixture of human care and wild freedom is best for them, given the hazards they encounter when they come into contact with the human world.
“Flaco and other urban raptors face many of the same opportunities and threats,” Sebo says. “It can be easy to forget that we share urban spaces with other animals ... and that there are concrete, tractable policies that can improve their well-being. Flaco reminded us of these realities. And what we need to do now is apply that same level of concern to other urban animals, too.”
Ultimately, a combination of pigeon herpes, rodenticide poisoning and a collision with a building ended Flaco’s life in 2024. At a packed New York City screening in early August, there wasn’t a dry eye in the theater as we watched footage of Flaco’s “funeral” gathering in Central Park. Since then “Flaco’s law” has passed in New York City. The law calls for the replacement of some sources of rodenticide with rat contraceptives to reduce harm to urban raptors in the city, along with broader plans for urban wildlife management.
Lane says she wanted to leave viewers asking questions about the structures that influence human-animal relationships and tried to represent as many viewpoints as possible to tell that story.
“What was best for Flaco, ultimately, I think, is the question of the film,” Lane says. “I always want to give everyone their best platform to make their best argument. And I want my films to be the best versions of arguments in conversation with one another.”
