Nature Writer David Gessner and 'The Book of Flaco'

Professor and award-winning nature writer, David Gessner, joins Writer’s Voices to discuss his latest book about the famed owl, Flaco, titled The Book of Flaco: The World’ Most Famous Bird. His book follows an owl named Flaco after he escaped from New York’s Central Park Zoo and spent the following year soaring around the city learning how to live outside of his cage. As Gessner describes it, “Flaco was an Eurasian eagle-owl, which is the largest owl competitive with one other owl species… and he was born in North Carolina… and at one-year-old, he was moved up to the New York Central Park Zoo where he spent the next twelve and a half years. On the night of February 2nd, 2023, some people… cut a hole in his small cage and he popped through and started flying down 5th Avenue. By the next morning, he had a hundred birders or so and some media people watching him as he perched in the Hallett Sanctuary in Central Park, and over the next months he developed not just a local following but an online following where people… were watching him through video as he grew… gradually Flaco started to regain… the skillset evolution had taught him, and he caught big fat rats in Central Park and… he learned to fly and the story just kind of took off, no doubt in part because it was in New York City, but the following ended up being worldwide… it had a huge Twitter following, and so to me it was pretty fascinating in a lot of levels.”

After Gessner had written The Book of Flaco, he had an urge to see an Eurasian eagle-owl in the wild, so he chronicled his search in the epilogue of the book. “The interesting thing about this is it could lead you anywhere. Where it led me was to Finland. I’d written the book, basically, and then… I thought, I really do need to see an Eurasian eagle-owl in the wild. As it happened, strangely, a Finnish nature writer had visited me a month before… we went out west in Finland and this guy took us up to a cliff… and as we were walking in, a young eagle-owl flew by… then we climbed up the cliff and saw this big owl with glowing orange eyes from up close and saw it diving, and at the end of the night it dove down 100 feet down into the valley, and my friend got a picture, and what it was diving for was to scare away a lynx. I was like, ok, here it is… it was a great week. I mean, I could’ve written a book just about that week.”