EP 857 What Does the World’s Most Famous Bird Tell Us About the Environmental Crises We Face?

Perhaps you were following the social media phenomenon in 2023 of Flaco, dubbed ‘the world’s most famous bird’ from the night when vandals at the Central Park Zoo cut a hole in his cage until his death a year later in a courtyard on the Upper West Side. The year-long odyssey captured the imagination of New Yorkers and people around the globe as he learned to survive in this urban landscape by eating rats, squirrels and birds.  This occurred despite the fact that this gorgeous Eurasian eagle-owl had spent his entire life previous to this in a cage.  In the deft hands of nature writer David Gessner, “The Book of Flaco” The World’s Most Famous Bird” is a cautionary tale of the hardscapes we have built and the way nature’s other species have had to navigate them.  In this age of the Anthropocene all of man’s decisions are having great impact on flora and fauna worldwide.  We open up our conversation’s aperture to describe its impacts in an age of rapid global warming.

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