Flashbacks: Echoes of Past Issues
why millions of people became obsessed with this bird, watching his movements day to day, and reveling in his adventures. Of course, differing views of Flaco’s “escape” emerged. Some saw Flaco as the immigrant coming to New York and learning to survive the rough streets. Some saw him as a victim of zoos in general and rejoiced in his freedom. Some wanted him caught and returned either to a zoo or to a sanctuary, worried about his safety as well as about other creatures in New York who had never encountered this invasive species. And some, because we were just emerging from our COVID lockdown, saw themselves in Flaco, finally emerging and living again. In fact, writes Gessner, “The poor owl carried so much symbolic weight that it was a miracle he could fly” (9). Even after death, Flaco stood for so many things: was he “Flaco-asRachel-Carson” illuminating the toxins we were putting into the world? Perhaps the zoo was at fault. They certainly didn’t do anything after the first month, only monitoring the owl from a distance. People felt that “someone had to be blamed” for his death (191). His life and death had become too important. Gessner interviews many Flaco followers for his book, including the playwright Nan Knighton. Flaco showed up outside her 13th floor Fifth Avenue kitchen window and stayed for three hours. Knighton told her children that other than their birthdays, the day she encountered Flaco was “one of the most exciting in her life” (5). How could this be? How could a three-hour encounter with an
owl outside your window have such “transcendence” and be “a quotidian epiphany” (72)? What was his existence giving people that they had lacked before? What need was he fulfilling simply by his presence? Gessner wisely says, “A bird encounter is one thing. An owl encounter is another” (68). To further explain this truism, let me digress for a bit. Since 2007 I have spent many months at an animal sanctuary in Namibia, Africa. I even wrote a book about Marieta Van der Merwe, the woman who started this amazing place simply by rescuing one vervet monkey from a boy selling it on the side of the road. I worked hands-on with all kinds of injured, orphaned, or abandoned wild animals:
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cheetahs, lions, leopards, baboons – the list goes on. One of the animals Marieta rescued was a baby white-faced scopsowl – only about five inches tall fully grown – that some San people (commonly called Bushmen) found lying on the ground, injured. They brought him to Marieta. Marieta nursed him back to health and released him, but he kept coming back and perching in her courtyard, begging for food. He had never learned to hunt. So Marieta named him DooDoo and he came to live in her kitchen, perched on cupboard doors, curtain rods, and ceiling fans, safe from marauding cats. She fed him a little bowl of raw meat every day and he would entertain us by growl-