The Ancestry of Flaco the Owl
Josh Nathan-Kazis
Mar 4
Excerpt:
In October of 1990, an owlet of the species Bubo bubo arrived at a bird sanctuary in Missouri. It’s not clear where he came from; his parents were likely born wild, somewhere across their species’ vast range, which stretches from Spain up to Norway, and across to Siberia, Mongolia, and down into China. The Missouri bird sanctuary named the young owlet Sinbad, and, a dozen years later, began mating him with another owl, a seven-year-old captive-born Bubo bubo named Martina.
The story of Sinbad and Martina and their offspring plays out across dozens of pages of charts noting hatchings, names, and the dates of transfers from one zoo to another. One of Sinbad and Martina’s daughters, an owl named Xena, was born in 2002 and sent to a North Carolina bird park, where, by 2017, she herself had hatched fifteen owlets. Her mate, a male named Watson, was also a second-generation captive; all four of his grandparents were imported to Canada from Europe in the mid-to-late 1980s, and were presumably born wild.
Watson and Xena’s owlets were sent to zoos and raptor sanctuaries across the United States. On February 2, one of them, a thirteen-year-old male named Flaco, escaped through a hole cut in the steel mesh of his small enclosure at the Central Park Zoo, just past the exit to the penguin room.
Flaco’s name appears to have been given to him at the North Carolina bird park where he was hatched. He already had it when he first went on display at the Central Park Zoo in 2010, according to an announcement the zoo made at the time. We can only guess at why the keepers in North Carolina named him Flaco: Maybe he was a particularly skinny owlet, or maybe a particularly fat one. Maybe Flaco was a keeper’s cousin’s nickname, or their boyfriend’s, and they named the owl in his honor.
https://joshnathankazis.substack.com/p/a-bad-omen-on-fifth-avenue