Tonight, after fly out the Eurasian Eagle-Owl went to three trees and then stayed within the construction site. It was a major change from previous nights where he hooted for hours before hunting. It had rained the previous night and it was possible that with the bad weather his priority was hunting. We didn’t see him catch anything, but I did get to see him on construction equipment twice, something I had missed on previous nights.

Based on the experiences of the last week, it looks like Flaco is either hunting directly after fly out or waiting until around midnight when the park settles down before the 1 am closure.

He’s been seen on lampposts this last week, which is something I hadn’t seen much of before. He also seems to be more focused on flying bats and birds at night. Often appearing to chase after them.

Flaco had been out of the zoo for two months on Sunday night It’s been fascinating to watch him acclimate to life outside of his zoo cage. He surprised everyone by how well he’s been doing adjusting to life in the wild. He’s carved out a niche for himself in the north end of Central Park, and has fallen into a fairly consistent routine.

This next month will be an interesting time to watch him. The trees are going to be leafing out and we will have numerous spring migrants arriving. How theses changes impact him, and how he impacts our spring arrivals and nesting birds will be what I’ll be studying this month.

On Sunday night, Flaco flew all around the north end of the park for at least an hour. The three of us watching him certainly got our “steps in”. Eventually he settled down and parked himself on a small mound opposite a dumpster, but flew off when a park truck came to offload some recyclables.

Later he flew to a Black Locust and after about fifteen minutes, flew across the East Drive and onto a small lawn. We thought he was just going there to hunt, but he had caught a small rodent, either a White-Footed Mouse or an immature Brown Rat. It was only when he started to eat it, did we realize he had caught something he had seen 100 yards away.

We had invited two police officers to watch with us, and two of their colleagues joined us. They all got to see Flaco eat and fly off, via a monitor mounted on my tripod. They were excited to see Flaco, and they shared news that they had seen a coyote earlier in the evening.

After dinner, I caught up with Flaco, Central Park’s Eurasian Eagle-Owl. He was hooting from a Black Locust, the Snowy Owl used over two years ago. He was holding a half-eaten Brown Rat. He was in no rush to finish off the rodent, and hooted from a few trees, moving between them every so often. Occasionally we heard a hoot with a different pitch, and after looking at the video feed realized it was because he would sometime hoot with the rat in his mouth, which altered the note.

Eventually, he finished off his meal. When we left the park, he appeared to have begun hunting yet again.

His hooting was a few blocks away from the Red-tailed Hawk nest on the Museum of the City of New York and we wondered what the Red-tailed Hawk pair thought about the presence of the owl.

Flaco hooted both during the day and the evening on Sunday. His extensive hooting during the evening is now well known to the late evening Harlem Meer dog walkers!

I didn’t have a chance to see Flaco during the day. After dinner, I went to Central Park to see if I could find him. He had spent much of the early evening in the construction site, and a few individuals who had watched him had lost track of him by the time I arrived. We searched and searched, and finally due to his hooting, we found him. He was in a tree at the northern end of the construction site with a view of the Harlem Meer.

We lost track of him again as he returned to the center of the construction site. Almost giving up on him, I heard noises in a tree at Nutter’s Battery, which overlooks the Harlem Meer. He had landed oddly and was working to get to a better branch. He then flew to a nearby tree and began hooting. The sound carried to the north shore of the Harlem Meer, where intoxicated New Yorkers cutting through the park on their way home, hooted back every few minutes.

After about fifteen minutes, he moved to a tree fifty feet to the east and continued hooting. I stayed with him for about twenty minutes, but it was now past midnight so I called it a night.