Pjetar Nikac has been the superintendent at 267 West 89th Street, an eight-story apartment building near Riverside Park, for 30 years. What happened there Friday made it a day he wouldn’t forget.
Mr. Nikac was returning from a trip to the store at around 5 p.m. when he noticed an object on the ground in the building’s courtyard space.
“I thought it was a rock,” he said. “I came closer and I saw: Owl.”
Mr. Nikac knew immediately that it was not just any owl, but Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who just three weeks ago passed the one-year mark of living in the relative wilds of Manhattan after leaving the Central Park Zoo. Someone had cut open the mesh on his enclosure in an act of vandalism that remains unsolved.
Now, Flaco had apparently crashed into the building. Although he was still alive when Mr. Nikac found him and, with Alan Drogin, a birder and building resident, rushed to get him help, Flaco was soon pronounced dead.
On Saturday evening, the Central Park Zoo reported that the initial results of a necropsy showed that Flaco had died of acute traumatic injury. He had substantial hemorrhaging under his sternum and around his liver, as well as a small amount of bleeding behind one eye. Tests to determine whether the owl had been exposed to toxins or infectious diseases will take longer to complete.
So ended an improbable adventure for a large, fiery-eyed bird who captured the public’s attention in New York and beyond by showing he could thrive on his own, at least for a time, despite having lived nearly his entire life in captivity.