We New Yorkers are oft written off as cynics, per Oscar Wilde, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. And perhaps we are on occasion. But before you dismiss us root and branch, give us some credit for our willingness to clamber among those roots and branches.

We’re talking the birds of Gotham of course. There was the #MandarinDuck , aka #HotDuck , called by NewYorkMagazine ‘NYC’s most eligible bachelor’. There were Adele and Frank, a #peregrinfalcon couple raising their young 14 floors up in #FiDi , with 24 hour webcam coverage to boot.

There was #PaleMale , the world’s most famous #redtailedhawk , who hung out for years on the façade of a rather tony #FifthAvenue co-op, and the hawk couples Pale Male Junior and Charlotte, at one of Trump’s hotels, and the Cathedral of St John the Devine’s #TristanandIsolde .

Rousing us from our #Covid blues during the height of the pandemic, there was Rocky, a plucky little sight-seeing stowaway, who traveled south with the #RockefellerCenter Christmas tree to #RockCenter , ...

... and Barry. It wasn’t perhaps the most romantic of names, and for all we know, may not have even been gender appropriate, if such things even matter any more. But Barry was as great a tonic as we could wish for his fans reported breathlessly on his every move.

And for the last year, there’s been Flaco, a Eurasian owl who (once again, we use the word consciously) escaped from the zoo when his cage was vandalized and whose cheekiness and resilience been entertaining us hugely ever since.

We’d like to believe that Flaco’s popularity is not just one more shallow New York instance of a celebrity sighting, but rather a collective cri de coeur – we’re going to be alright, we still have some humanity and humility left in us, we can still recognize something bigger ...

... and better than ourselves. We would like to think so. But whatever it is, Flaco is no more, presumed killed flying into an upper west side building, and we are all genuinely the poorer for it. Take that, #OscarWilde .
#RIPFlaco #nycstories #streetsofNYC #birdsofnyc