Adventures with Flaco: One New York Couple’s Quest to Befriend a Fugitive
The great escape
Around 8:30 p.m. on Feb. 2, 2023, zookeepers doing their nightly rounds at the Central Park Zoo made an alarming discovery, prompting a call to 911. Flaco, a 12-year-old Eurasian eagle owl, who had lived in captivity since the age of 1, was missing from his exhibit. A prowler or prowlers had cut a hole in the stainless-steel mesh covering his enclosure, enabling Flaco to fly off into the wilds of Manhattan.
Thus began our adventure.
My wife, Lisa, and I do not consider ourselves “birders,” per se. Our combined ornithological knowledge means we can tell a pigeon and a parrot, but distinguishing a plover from a prion might be challenging. We do fancy ourselves celebrity bird watchers. In 2021, at the height of the COVID pandemic, we enjoyed trekking to Central Park with binoculars to marvel at Barry, a barred owl, who showed up out of the blue and captured our interest, as well as those of thousands of novice birders eager for any excuse to escape our coops while maintaining appropriate social distancing. Unfortunately, Barry’s reign as a celebrity bird was cut short when she was fatally struck by a park maintenance truck, apparently while intoxicated on rat poison she inadvertently ingested. We joined several hundred people at Barry’s memorial service near her favorite hemlock tree.
In 2018, the Mandarin Duck had a flash with stardom. We joined the massive crowds that flocked to Central Park to get a glimpse of the most colorful duck we’d ever laid eyes on.
For me, these notable birds became news stories and sources of artistic inspiration. In 2006, as a reporter for the New York Daily News, I interviewed Cosmopolitan magazine editor Helen Gurley Brown about the acclaimed red-tail hawk Pale Male, who was spotted perching with his mate, Lola, a few floors above her apartment at the Beresford on Central Park West. As a multimedia journalist for ABC News, I spent part of Christmas documenting the Mandarin Duck’s day on video.
Within a day of his escape, Flaco had become New York City’s latest celebrity bird. And the twist of foul play that sprung him from his cramped quarters was a bonus to the unfolding plot.
It wasn’t difficult for the cops to find him. Even outside Bergdorf Goodman’s on Fifth Avenue, his pointy tuffs, orange saucer eyes and mottled coat stood out among the fashionistas.
As days turned to weeks, Flaco defied the odds of survival given by experts who severely underestimated him. Proving he wasn’t dependent on the takeout food fetched by his zoo handlers, his natural instincts kicked in, and he quickly became the apex predator he was born to be, swooping down with his razor-sharp talons to pick from a smorgasbord of rats, squirrels, and mice.
He was thriving to the point his zookeepers commended his “rapid improvement in his flight skills and his ability to confidently maneuver around the park.”
As winter turned to spring, we followed Flaco to parts of Central Park once unknown to us, venturing to the North Woods and a construction site at the Harlem Meer where he likes to hang out.
Who knows where we’ll follow Flaco next? Like a true New Yorker, he’s shown an ability to adapt and the moxie to tackle the tumult of the big city. I guess that’s why we admire him, why I continue to try to capture him, if only in art.
Go Flaco!
Morning Read
Crayola pencil, White Out, ink, acrylic on paper
Hang in There
Drawing: Crayola pencils, ink, White Out, acrylic on paper; digitally emblellished.
Mouse Dragon of Seattle
The idea came from my niece, Eleanor.
We were at the wedding of another niece, Alianna, a few years back in the Cascade Mountains of Washington when Eleanor, then a five-year-old, and I began conversing. She told me of a fictional creature she called the Mouse Dragon, who lived under Seattle’s famed Space Needle.
There wasn’t much to her story, but what I gathered is that the Mouse Dragon was very nice and strong enough to hold up the landmark’s observation deck. I don’t remember much more of her imaginative tale, but the image of a strange rodent-like dragon stayed with me. I assumed, rightly or wrongly, that it was inspired by a scroll-box painting I had made for her parents as a wedding gift. The six-foot-long canvas in a boxed wooden frame features the Space Needle with its observation deck being held up by pillars that resemble human characters.
The idea to create scroll-box paintings came from a scroll-type advertisement I saw one day while waiting for a bus in New York City. I thought how great it would be to make an interactive painting, one that gives the viewer a chance to manipulate the piece by turning devices I fashioned from copper tubing. It wasn’t until this year, that I learned from a friend my muse/wife, Lisa, and I visited in Los Angeles that a similar art medium was popular in the 1960s and called "Crankies.”
Inspired by Eleanor’s Mouse Dragon, I wrote a song to go with this video of the scroll-box painting made for her mom and dad. The video will take you on a two-minute, 16-second trip from New York to Seattle. The song begins with the lyrics, Mouse Dragon’s got the soul of a been-there swan, used the be the hot rodent on the red queen’s lawn.
I hope you enjoy it,
B. Hutch
December 2021
Making of a would-be iconic painting
“Artists are here to disturb the peace.”
‘What We Saw’ began with just that: What we saw in the spring and summer of 2020.
As a journalist who paints, I’m attempting to tell stories in two distinct mediums, both requiring me to process what I hear and observe and make sense of it all in words, paint, pencil, photography, video and digital formats. It’s not about making political statements. It is about one person’s attempt, feeble at times, at understanding the world … with one wish: That the only thing we shoot at each other are flowers.
What We Saw were our streets filled with protests and pain, awakening to social media alerts of another police killing of a Black person. Up-close and in living color, a ring of video cameras captured multiple angles bearing the sheer agony of an American dying under the knee of a civil servant sworn to protect. It prompted a wave of mass civil and uncivil disobedience surpassing the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s.
What We Saw was a persistent pandemic that has killed more than 4 million people worldwide, and turned life upside down, inside out. What’s up is now down; horizontal, now vertical.
What We Saw was the most divisive presidential election ever, an estrangement of the red, white, and blue that spilled into the new year with a deadly insurrection at the nation’s Capitol.
The Sketch
Crayola pencil, ink on paper, 9 in. x 5.5 in.
My attempt to capture the three-headed theme of an unforgettable year on a 24-inch by 16-inch canvas began with this sketch:
The Faces
After Memorial Day, I could walk out of my apartment near midtown Manhattan, wade into the masked-up masses and run into a protest within a one-block radius. I wanted to catch the earnest faces of fed-up people marching for justice:
A Blurred Year
My drawing, eventually, painting, portrays these fractured times — as if the work had been cut up and not perfectly pieced back together.
The border of this painting is symbolic of the pandemic, politics and pathos occurring within the United States, blurred by the whipsaw rapidness of What We Saw.
“Hang in There” — Crayola pencil, ink, White Out, acrylic on paper and digitally embellished. 2022