A Celebration of Books,
Writers & LIterary Excellence

Save the Date


Gaithersburg
Book Festival

May 17, 2025

10am – 6pm

Bohrer Park


David Gessner

Latest Title: The Book of Flaco: The World's Most Famous Bird
The Book of Flaco: The World's Most Famous Bird

The story of Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from Central Park Zoo and captured the hearts and imaginations of millions of followers around the world, with 32 pages of stunning color photographs.

This is a parable of freedom, wildness, and our urban ecosystems. Flaco has been dubbed “the world’s most famous bird.” From the night in February of 2023 when vandals cut a hole in his cage until his death a year later in a courtyard on the Upper West Side, his is a story full of adventure and unexpected turns.

Nature writer David Gessner chronicles the year-long odyssey of Flaco and the human drama that followed the owl who captured the imaginations of New Yorkers and people around the world. Though he’d spent his life in a cage, Flaco learned to survive in New York City by eating rats, squirrels, and birds. He was an immigrant coming from elsewhere to make it in the big city. Central Park, the island of green in an urban sea, was his new home territory.

Flaco’s urban adventure brought controversy, pitting those who felt he should be returned to the safety of the zoo against those who created the “Free Flaco” movement. The birding world was fractured over the ethics of the online sharing of his location that brought scores of enthusiasts to view him each day. And his end—with a grim necropsy revealing Flaco had suffered a viral infection from eating pigeons and had multiple rodenticides in his system—serves as a Rachel Carson-esque warning about the harm we’ve done to our urban environments, inspiring the passage of long-sought legislation protecting urban birds and regulations meant to reduce the use of rodenticides in New York City.

About David Gessner

David Gessner is the author of “The Book of Flaco: The World’s Most Famous Bird,” and many other books that blend a love of nature, humor, memoir and environmentalism, including The New York Times best-selling “All the Wild That Remains.” David is a professor at University of North Carolina Wilmington, where he also founded the literary magazine, Ecotone. His own magazine publications include pieces in The New York Times Magazine, Outside, Orion, and many other magazines. In 2017, he hosted the National Geographic Explorer show, “The Call of the Wild.”

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