Flaco the owl turns into NYC peeping Tom: ‘Scared the you-know-what out of me’
Flaco the owl is a peeping Tom.
The Big Apple’s most famous feathered fugitive has taken to spying on fellow Manhattanites through their apartment windows less than a year after flying the coop from the Central Park Zoo.
But residents aren’t crying fowl, instead delighting in their unusual visitor — at least once the initial shock wears off.
“It absolutely scared the you-know-what out of me,” Reilly Richardson, 31, told the Wall Street Journal after spotting Flaco’s bright-orange eyes recently peering through the window of her Manhattan apartment on three consecutive mornings.
“I hope he comes back,” she told the Journal. “It was a really fun three days.”
Digital marketer Matt Sweeney told the outlet he “audibly gasped” when he got a bird’s-eye view of the Eurasian eagle-owl while sitting at his desk in his third-floor Upper West Side apartment.
“It was pretty mesmerizing,” Sweeney said.
Since escaping the zoo in February with the help of some vandals, Flaco had taken up residence in and around Central Park, topping the list of the area’s who’s-hoo of notable avian dwellers and making headlines worldwide.
City residents and tourists alike flock to areas where he has reportedly been spotted, hoping to catch a glimpse of him going about his daily routine, including feasting on rats.
Stella Hamilton, a nurse who lives close to Central Park, told the Journal she’s made daily treks to visit Flaco’s last-known perching whereabouts. She even hailed a cab to the East Village about six miles from home after receiving an alert he was seen in the area.
She arrived just in time to catch Flaco take flight from a tree branch to a nearby rooftop, looking back at his assembled crowd of admirers as he landed.
“It felt like there was meaning to his gaze,” Hamilton told the outlet.
“You again?” she said, imagining the bird’s inner monologue. “How did you find me?”
Flaco was spotted again about two days later, this time on the Lower East Side, by psychologist Robin Herbst-Paparne. The resident said she was enjoying some quality time on the couch with a book and her cat, Lucy Goose, when she heard a loud crashing sound outside her window.
Herbst-Paparne said that’s when she saw Flaco cooling his talons on her air conditioner, “staring off at the skyline,” she told the Journal.
“I think he was just taking in the city life,” the resident said.
Karla Bloem, executive director of the International Owl Center, told The Post on Monday that Flaco seeking a vantage point atop a window AC unit more than a dozen stories off the ground aligns with the bird’s natural instincts.
“Eurasian Eagle Owls often nest on cliff ledges, and I suppose if you are in an urban jungle, air conditioning units on the sides of tall buildings are about as close as you get to that instinctive search for a potential cliff-ledge nest site,” she wrote in an e-mail.
As for Flaco’s newfound peeping habit, Bloem said the bird’s upbringing in captivity means he’s likely unafraid of humans and that he could be simply “people-watching, looking for potential mates, looking at pets in apartments or who knows what.
“Owls are curious, like cats,” she said.
Although Flaco’s behavior can mostly be chalked up to instinctive behavior and curiosity, Bloem said there is a chance he is so accustomed to humans that he may seek one out for a mate, which could lead to an awkward encounter.
“Then he may try to land on people’s heads to copulate,” she said, citing an escaped eagle-owl in the Netherlands who earned the nickname “cuddly owl” that way.
In his time on the lam, Flaco has routinely made the rounds from Central Park to across Manhattan, being spotted everywhere from Alphabet City and the Lower East Side to all around the uptown area.
The 13-year-old owl seems to have a penchant for the high life, with sightings reported in a tree outside The Plaza Hotel and atop the iconic 241 Central Park West high-rise apartment building.
Less than three weeks after his escape, Central Park Zoo officials abandoned their attempted recovery but said in a statement to The Guardian that they would “continue monitoring Flaco and his activities and to be prepared to resume recovery efforts if he shows any sign of difficulty or distress.”
The NYPD even got in on the fun with a cheeky post on X the night of his Feb. 2 escape after trying in vain to wrangle the “lil wise guy.
“Well, that was a hoot. We tried to help this lil wise guy, but he had enough of his growing audience & flew off. @NYCParks Rangers, be on the lookout — he was last seen flying south on 5th Avenue,” the city’s Police Department said.
