America’s best-known owl is getting his own book.
North Carolina-based nonprofit press Blair will publish David Gessner’s The Book of Flaco: The World's Most Famous Bird next year, People magazine reports. The press describes the book as “a fable of freedom and wildness.”
Flaco, a Eurasian eagle-owl, lived for 12 years in New York’s Central Park Zoo until early 2023, when vandals damaged his cage and he escaped. Zoo employees were unable to recapture him, and he spent the following year in the park and other locations in Manhattan.
The owl captured the imagination of New York and the country, with city residents and tourists alike clamoring to see him. In late February, he flew into a Manhattan building and died. In May, zoo officials announced that his remains would be donated to the American Museum of Natural History.
“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,” the publisher says. “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.”
Gessner, whose previous books include Return of the Osprey and A Traveler’s Guide to the End of the World, told People, “I loved the wild, orange shine of Flaco’s eyes and also the fact that he perched atop air conditioners and fire escapes and loved hooting down from water towers high over the city. This is what led me to exploring Central Park a month after Flaco’s escape, to speaking to many who were equally obsessed, and finally, to writing this book."
The Book of Flaco is scheduled for publication on Feb. 11, 2025.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
