The story of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from Central Park Zoo and captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of followers around the world.

This is a fable of freedom and wildness. Flaco has been dubbed “the world’s most famous bird.” From the night in February of 2023 when vandals cut a hole in his cage until his death a year later in a courtyard on the Upper West Side, his is a story full of adventure and unexpected turns.

Nature writer David Gessner chronicles the year-long odyssey of Flaco—the owl who captured the imaginations of New Yorkers and people around the world. Though he’d spent his life in a cage, Flaco learned street smarts, surviving the mean streets by eating rats. He was an immigrant coming from elsewhere to make it in the big city. Central Park, the island of green in an urban sea, was his new home territory.

Flaco’s wild adventure captured the imagination of so many—unfolding during a time when we too were getting outside and seeing the world after the extended house arrest of COVID. And his end—with a grim necropsy revealing Flaco had suffered a viral infection from eating pigeons and had multiple rodenticides in his system—serves as a Rachel Carson-esque warning about the harm we’ve done to our urban birds.