Today, any hope for a happy end to Flaco's story came to an end. The bird was killed after colliding with a building. This is one of the more common human-caused mortalities inflicted upon birds in the modern world, though Flaco was certainly one of the more famous victims.
I hope Flaco's death helps to draw attention to window-strikes, a major cause of mortality for wild birds. I also hope that it serves to remind any misguided folks who were celebrating his bird's "freedom" that this is not a happy ending. Flaco flying loose in Central Park was not a triumphant story of a bird finding freedom. It's a story of an animal forced into unfamiliar surroundings, not his natural environment, and struggling to survive for a year before dying an unnatural death.
I hope that his former caretakers are able to have some sense of closure, though I know it's not what they were hoping for, by a long shot. I hope that the people who hindered efforts to bring this bird home come to terms with the fact that their actions helped hasten the death of this bird. And while I doubt that the perpetrator of this initial crime will ever be brought to justice, I hope the guilt of what they did weighs heavily on them.
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