Posted on 12/18/2023 11:53:53 AM PST by Red Badger
NEW YORK—One recent morning, Reilly Richardson woke up to being watched. She jumped out of bed, went to the window of her Manhattan apartment and fell to the floor when she saw the peeper.
“It absolutely scared the you-know-what out of me,” she recalls about the 2-foot-tall owl staring back at her. “It’s New York City. It’s the last thing you expect to see.”
Richardson, 31, and an actor, didn’t know it then, but her feathered visitor was Flaco, an orange-eyed Eurasian eagle-owl who became a New York celebrity after he escaped a zoo in February and turned leafy Central Park into his home. He’s drawn binocular-toting crowds who couldn’t help but root for a creature, like them, trying to make it in the big city.
Over time, though, Flaco’s behavior has shifted. He’s become a true nosy New Yorker, a bit of a hoot and a real owl about town.
Flaco is a gawker, flying out of Central Park and around Manhattan, sometimes standing outside windows with his beak to the glass, and his large round eyes peering inside.
“I audibly gasped,” says Matt Sweeney, a digital marketer who was at his desk at home in the Upper West Side of Manhattan recently when Flaco graced his third-floor window
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(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Well, there are birds colored just as extravagantly; all I know is that yours is not a ‘murican’ one :-)
It’s been a NYC story for months. Some kooks let the bird out on purpose.
It’s important to point out, That story has nothing to do with my over caffeinated bird.🤣
I think humans have been giving him food...
Eurasian Eagle Owls have a slightly larger wingspan and higher mass that a Great-horned Owl. Still, both are apex predators.
Beautiful birds. I’m surprised they can’t catch it with a bow trap.
Humans have been giving him food all of his life! He was raised in captivity, and probably associates us with food. The fact that he can hunt down rats is impressive...
AI
it’s fake.
He is probably looking at his reflection. Poor guy probably wants to meet another Eurasian Eagle-Owl and is trying to figure out how to get together.
Aw, you're right. Poor guy! Slim pickin's in the city.
We watched a nice move the other night: ‘Christmas Mountain’ with Slim Pickens.
A little maudlin here and there, but nice for Christmas:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080531/
Well, no real owl should look like that. It would seem to be counterproductive to their biologically engineered performance mechanisms :-)
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