‘Like a legend’: documentary tells strange story about Flaco the Owl | Documentary films

FLaco the Eurasian owl gained a cult following after he left his captivity at the Central Park zoo in 2023 and survived, against all odds, for over a year as a free bird in Manhattan.

Bird watchers followed all his stepsholding his big wings and bright orange eyes with their cameras. His fans he has tattoos in his honor. And now, Wild Inside, Flaco’s new documentary about the town, is set to premiere this week.

Penny Lane, who directed the documentary, said she felt compelled to talk about Flaco because, like so many other New Yorkers, she found herself out of her element. “Owls are uniquely magical creatures,” he said. “It’s related to other countries, this amazing place new York City… looks like a fairy tale. “

Flaco escaped from the zoo in February 2023, after someone deliberately cut through the fence where he lived for 13 years. Zoo workers and bird watchers fear for his well-being. Flaco didn’t know how to hunt alone. Onlookers noticed that he had trouble flying. Attempts to persuade him to return with live lab rats were unsuccessful.

But in time, he realized. Local birders wrote that he managed to hunt and eat many of the city’s rats. And two weeks later, zoo officials called off their efforts to recapture him. Flaco had done the impossible: he had learned to be wild again, perhaps in the most dangerous of places – the concrete jungle of New York City. “As the saying goes, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere,” said a news editor in an article about an owl.

Lane wanted to capture Flaco’s wild antics in the film, incorporating interviews with New Yorkers who celebrate Flaco’s every sighting with background music and visuals. He spoke to New Yorkers from all over the world who shared their experiences with the owl that won, calling it a survivor and calling it another immigration success story (Eurasian owls are a non-native species). “Every New Yorker dreams of moving out of their little apartment into the best place and Flaco did it,” Seth Meyers joked. and the Late Show monologue.

“New Yorkers, we love the common man,” Lane laughed. But for the local bird community, Flaco’s story went beyond that. Lane said: “We were watching a zoo animal transform into a wild animal. Flaco’s ability to revert to habits he didn’t use in his life was raising questions about the nature of the wild – and whether it exists in all of us as it did for Flaco.”

“He was born in captivity. His parents were born in captivity. His grandfather was born in captivity. As far as I can tell, he was as close to a domesticated wild animal as you can get in the sense that he was of a captive lineage,” Lane said. “But he quickly showed that he wasn’t a pet.”

But Flaco’s story doesn’t have a fairytale ending. A year after his escape, Flaco crashed into a building on West 89th Street and died as a result. An autopsy conducted on his body found that he was weakened by the pigeon virus, which he caught by eating the pigeons he hunted, and four types of anticoagulants that are common in rodenticides used to kill rats – the cause of death and disease for all the wild birds that hunt rats in New York City.

Lane said: “I was devastated. They planned to film Flaco for the rest of his life, he thought it would be 10 years. Bird watchers and naturalists interviewed for the film struggled with the question of whether Flaco would have been better off if he had never escaped from the zoo – no longer free, but alive and safe in the back.”

A few months after his death, the city council approved the “Flaco rule”a strategy that established an experimental method of sending rodenticides instead of pesticides in order to reduce the population.

The year Flaco spent staring at water towers and peering out of apartment windows was short, yes — but it was amazing how it brought nature into the chaos of Manhattan, a reminder to the city’s residents of the magic they have, Lane said. “There are places in New York City that will be forever changed by having them in those places,” Lane said. “I’ll walk down certain blocks and be like, ‘Oh, this is where I heard her cry on the Upper West Side for the first time and I couldn’t believe how loud it was.’

“Wherever he went, he left the place like magic, and the magic is still there.”