Freedom and Folly

Early last year, the country was fixated on the news out of the Dallas Zoo, where a vandal was responsible for multiple instances of animals being released from their enclosure.  At the same time, there was a copycat incident in New York's Central Park Zoo, where a vandal damaged an enclosure allowing Eurasian eagle owl Flaco to escape into the city.  Zoo officials tried diligently to recapture the bird, but were frequently thwarted by the most dangerous, least rational creature in the world - humans.  Some people, self-styled activists, were deliberately trying to sabotage zoo efforts to catch the bird by scaring the owl off.  Others were birdwatchers who, in their enthusiasm for seeing the bird, drove him off.

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.

Flaco, the Eurasian Eagle Owl, has died

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.