There continued to be only one owl tonight. It who flew to the area between he compost and the nursery before flying to the ground on the hill, and then to a rodent colony be one of the dumpsters. Then the owl gave us the slip!
There continued to be only one owl tonight. It who flew to the area between he compost and the nursery before flying to a rodent colony be one of the dumpsters. This is an area we often saw Flaco hunt in, although he would perch a bit higher than the Long-eared Owl.
Flaco was in similar locations on Sunday night, as he had been on Saturday night. It is hard to watch Flaco, hoot for hours knowing he will never find another Eurasian Eagle-Owl. He certainly is a stranger in a strange land. There isn’t much that can be done at this point. The genie is out of the bottle. Or maybe we need a new expression, the owl is out of the zoo.
Flaco is already a risk to native wildlife, and certainly would be if he had a mate, so it would be inappropriate to release a female Eurasian Eagle-Owl to join him. And of course if he bred, the offspring would be forced to mate with their siblings. So, introducing another owl isn’t a solution. (And for those thinking of introducing an infertile female owl might be a solution, even an infertile pair would be aggressive towards native wildlife, especially Peregrine Falcons.)
For those wishing he would mate with a native species, such as a Great Horned Owl, this is highly unlikely. Successful cross breeding of Eurasian Eagle-Owls with other bubo species, have only been recorded in captivity. And if Flaco had offspring with another bubo species, it could corrupt the gene pool for native species.
This is what happens when you glorify a criminal act, and create an environment where a zoo is allowed to abandon its responsibility to recover an animal in its collection.
I’ve been either getting brief glimpses of Flaco, or just missing him by an hour or two over the last week. So, it was delightful to quickly find him and spend three hours watching him on Saturday night into early Sunday morning. He was hooting on buildings within a few blocks of 86th Street and Central Park West.
Sunday and Monday were frustrating. Although we could see them a bit on Sunday, it was too dark to watch them well on Monday. They continued to use the thickets around the hill behind the compost heap, and the ground on a mound on the east side of the compost area.
The Long-eared Owls often would fly from their roost tree to a thicket of saplings between the nursery and the compost heap. They would then fly to the ground on a hill on the east side of the compost area and back into the saplings on the east and south sides of the area.
This was the first time I’d seen Long-eared Owls on the ground and it was a thrill to see the behavior.
