“Pick an animal. Any animal.”
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The words came, not from a magician, but from Linda Hogan, the Native American professor, of the Chickasaw tribe, who was my teacher in a creative writing class at the University of Colorado.
I picked a common enough animal, a great blue heron, and following Linda’s assignment, spent two weeks watching it, sketching it, taking notes on its movements. And…….and, how to put this? Well, it changed everything. The assignment had seemed straightforward, dull. But it turned out to be anything but. It turned out to be thrilling.
At first, clomping out to the creek with my sketchpad in hand, I tended to scare the bird off and so saw it mostly in flight. But even that was something: its wingbeats deep and slow, its long neck pulled back into its chest. After a while I managed to sit still and so the bird sat still too. Or somewhat still since it seemed to be a bird of a thousand postures. Its neck would crane up and then pull back into a down periscope position. I studied its blue gray color, its quiet breathing, its blue primary feathers and gray secondaries. It was boring work at first, but gradually took on a kind of quiet excitement.
My own experience had taught me that you never know where these trips will lead you.
Before those weeks of watching the heron, I had already spent some years working hard at becoming a writer and that work included many hours of reading, researching, writing and planning. But waiting and watching were something new
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Over thirty years later, in the spring of 2024, I found myself giving the same assignment to a class of graduate students in an environmental writing class. Though I like to read memoirs, and have written a couple, in recent years I have to push students beyond the self as subject. One way to do this is to put those selves out in the natural world. In my own work I’ve found that birds are particularly good at this: something about their flight lifts me out of myself. But any animal will do. My students began work on essays about dolphins, monarch butterflies, alligators, hummingbirds, and jellyfish.
That was where it started, but my hope was that it would lead to someplace else. John Muir wrote: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Which means that learning about monarch butterflies might lead to learning about everything. Having found their animals, I encouraged my students to follow them. To go where it lives, trace its migration, talk to experts, talk to locals who live near it and know it in a way experts might not. If this requires a true journey all the better.
My own experience had taught me that you never know where these trips will lead you. The exercise that Linda Hogan gave me long ago had led to my getting obsessed with osprey, those daring birds that dive for fish for a living, and that had led not just to two books but to my following the birds on their fall migration to Cuba and Venezuela.
We talked in class about these trips that focus on an animal, or, sometimes, an idea or person, and decided to call them “vacations with a purpose.” These purposeful vacations have become one of the best parts of my own writing life, a counterbalance to the pleasant daily drudgery of sitting at a desk. On these trips seventy percent of my job is talking to strangers. As a rule, I don’t over-plan my itinerary but throw myself into them. Strange coincidences and good luck tend to follow. Sometimes it feels as if you have stepped inside the book you are writing, a part of story you are trying to tell.
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The class began in January.
The funny thing was that in February I took my own assignment.
A year before, in February of 2023, a male Eurasian eagle-owl, a species not native to this hemisphere, had escaped from the Central Park Zoo after someone cut a hole in his enclosure. For the next year the bird claimed Central Park, and then New York City itself, as his territory. His followers, both on-line and on foot, knew the owl as “Flaco,” the name the zoo had given him. Those followers would eventually number in the millions.
On February 23, 2024 Flaco was found near death in a concrete courtyard by the super of an upper West Side apartment building. Flaco did die later that day, likely from falling from a perch on a fire escape after being weakened by rat poison and a disease it had caught from eating pigeons.
Though I live in North Carolina, I happened to be in New York City the day Flaco died. I was there to visit my daughter Hadley, who was a sophomore at NYU and who, like Flaco himself it turned out, had started life in North Carolina before moving to New York. Unlike thousands of people in New York, I was not obsessed with Flaco, not yet, though I did know about the owl and had spent one day in early fall of 2023 in Central Park, searching unsuccessfully for him.
But, flying back to North Carolina, I began to wonder if I should take my own assignment and join my students in writing about an animal. While they chased alligators and monarchs should I chase an owl? Though I would not be able to observe it as I’d once done the heron, I was intrigued by the idea of an animal surviving in the urban wild of New York.
I began tentatively. I called up David Barrett, who was one of the central players in the Flaco saga and whose X account, Manhattan Bird Alert @BirdCentralPark, helped others follow the bird both in the park and on their screens. Barrett was generous with his time, explaining many aspects of the story for me and offering to take me on a tour of Flaco’s favorite spots if I flew back up to New York. There were plenty of reasons not to do it. It was early in the spring term, I was busy, the trip was too expensive, I had obligations, miles to go and all that. I said yes anyway.
On March 6, two weeks after Flaco’s death, David led me on a tour of Flaco’s favorite haunts. We emerged from Central Park around 81st Street and headed north, passing the famous Beresford building on 211 Central Park West with its massive octagonal towers. A light rain was falling. We stopped at a spot a little farther north, and he pointed at another building, brownish beige in color and one row back behind the first line of buildings. There was an exhaust cage on top where Flaco perched.
“This is the last place I saw him,” he said.
We walked a little farther west, where David showed me a water tower that Flaco favored. I stared up through the scratchy hand of a honey locust that grew out of a dirt patch on the sidewalk of 86th Street. I had never really noticed water towers in New York before but after that I would see them everywhere. The great ancient-looking tubs, archaic-seeming, carbuncles from another century topping off modern buildings. Perfect owl perches.
After I thanked David and said goodbye, I hurried east across the park to the Central Park Zoo. I wanted to see the cage that Flaco had been kept in, and when I did I was shocked at how small it was. I talked with a maintenance worker, who I would go on to regard as the Deep Throat of my Flaco case, and he explained that whoever cut the cage would have had to use a grinder, a professional tool, to cut through the steel mesh of the cage. He pointed out where the cameras were and how whoever freed the bird might have avoided them.
I thanked him and when he left I found a bench and took furious notes in my journal. In two hours the idea of a book had gone from a maybe to a probably. I could imagine picking up Flaco and finding him hitched to everything. I headed to my downtown hotel to nap but later took the subway back uptown to the fifth avenue apartment of Nan Knighton.
Nan relished November 14, 2023, the afternoon of her visitation from Flaco. She knew nothing about the bird before it landed on the ledge outside her kitchen window and for three hours stared in at her with his huge orange eyes. After that day she, like so many people in New York and around the world, became obsessed with the owl. A couple weeks after her visitation, at Thanksgiving, she’d catch her kids looking at each other across the room and almost laughing. She asked, what is it? What is it? And they said, “Well, you sure talk a lot about Flaco.”
Sometimes it feels as if you have stepped inside the book you are writing, a part of story you are trying to tell.
I had texted her as I walked from the West side to the zoo that morning, not really expecting a reply, but she had written back and invited me over. Suddenly we were having drinks in her living room and talking Flaco while staring out at the Central Park Reservoir and across the park at the lights of the Upper West Side, where Flaco spent his last days. Nan showed me the kitchen and the window where Flaco had stared in at her.
I had come to New York unsure about the project but waking up in my hotel the next morning I knew I was going to write a book. I didn’t have the time or money for it and I would have to write the book fast, but I knew I’d do it. True, I had never seen the bird but, I reasoned, Tom Wolfe had never gone into space when he wrote The Right Stuff. And it turned out there were hundreds of hours of film of the bird that I could watch, maybe not exactly what Linda Hogan had in mind but a way to see him.
Over the next months I interviewed many of the people who had fallen in love with the owl, watched hours and hours of film, hosted a zoom call with people who had followed Flaco on-line from different states and countries, visited the zoo where Flaco was born, talked to the man who had found him dead. You never know where these obsessions will take you, and mine ended up taking me to Finland, where I would see my first wild eagle-owl diving off a cliff to attack a lynx.
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If daily writing and adventure can be complimentary aspects of a writing life, so can two opposite techniques, the watching and waiting that Linda Hogan taught, and the full-on plunging in that is required once we decide to write a book. “Boldness and commitment brought rewards,” the biographer Walter Jackson Bate wrote in his biography in Keats. As Keats said of his long poem Endymion: “I leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, & the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea & comfortable advice.”
How does an idea become a book? Sometimes it starts with watching. Sometimes it starts with finding something and picking it up. But with luck we follow it and get obsessed. Maybe we find a way to take a vacation with a purpose, during which we talk to strangers, talk to everyone. And finally, if we are very lucky, we find that the thing we have picked up is hitched to everything else in the universe.
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The Book of Flaco: The World’s Most Famous Bird by David Gessner is available from Blair.
Featured image: Maurice van Bruggen, used under CC BY-SA 3.0.
