A Bird’s-Eye View of Manhattan: ‘Wild Inside’ Chronicles Flaco’s Flight

Where were you when Flacomania overtook New York City? Should you be as clueless about this phenomenon as your humble critic, Penny Lane — yes, that’s her real name — is here to enlighten us. Her documentary, “Wild Inside,” iterates the controversies, conundrums, excitement and heartbreak that stemmed from an escapee’s adventures outside of the lock-up. In 2023, an Eurasian eagle owl, Flaco, escaped from the Central Park Zoo.The media, as one newscaster had it, “went nuts” with the story. The Wall Street Journal ran a headline informing its readership that “Flaco the Famous New York City Owl Has Become a Peeping Tom.” The New York Historical Society saw fit to honor the owl as “a true New Yorker embodying pluck and resilience.” Social media was inundated with Flaco sightings. He was, writes Ms. Lane, “the most documented owl in human history!!!” Her film features a lot of photos and films of the majestic bird who died nearly a year after his escape after colliding with a building on the Upper West Side.Flaco and friends. Sandbox Films via Benny PolatseckThe saga began around 8:00 p.m. on February 2, 2023 when a vandal cut the wire mesh on an exhibit at the Central Park Zoo. Not soon thereafter, Flaco scrabbled through the opening and ended up alighting on “the least owlly place in Manhattan.” An animated graphic shows us that Flaco landed on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and 60th Street just up the block from Bergdorf Goodman and The Plaza. Documentary footage of “New York’s Finest” attempting to shepherd the big bird into a dog crate is its own kind of comedy.Flaco eventually took flight and perched in a tree a stone’s throw from Essex House. Zoo officials were convinced that an animal raised in captivity would eventually work its way back to them: Flaco had, after all, never hunted. Their attempts were fruitless, and zookeepers decided to monitor, rather than capture, Flaco. Was the Central Park Zoo derelict in its duties? “I went home and I almost cried,” avers one serious-as-death birder, “I don’t know how you could just abandon an animal after two weeks, I just don’t know.”Should you be unaware that New York City is made up of folks who are given to intractable and often narrowly applied passions, “Wild Inside” will be an eye-opener. There is, for example, “The Bunny Lady,” a peculiarly intense woman who has transformed a room in her apartment into a multi-level rabbit hutch. A journalist testifies to the inequities of an ecosystem in which animals hunt other animals for sustenance. After making a brief on behalf of the not-much-beloved Norway rat, she informs us that “yes, there is pain and there is death out here.” Good to know.That the natural world is sometimes less a subject of wonder than a not-so-obliquely held mirror to our wants-and-needs is a notion that’s been with us since our ancestors were daubing pictures of bison on the cave walls. A bevy of contemporary New Yorkers go on to testify to how Flaco became an emblem of forces beyond their own reckoning, a harbinger of not only the natural world but their own aspirations. “Wild Inside” has as much to say about our own foibles than it does about the late and much lamented Flaco.

A Bird’s-Eye View of Manhattan: ‘Wild Inside’ Chronicles Flaco’s Flight

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