8:30 PM. Prompted by the Wild Bird Fund, a wildlife rehabilitation hospital, NYPD officers unsuccessfully attempted to capture the owl when he was seen Thursday night near the Bergdorf Goodman Building on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan. He was found in a tree in the southern part of Central Park the next day, and has spent time in various parts of Central Park, including the Hallett Nature Sanctuary, the area around the zoo, and even in the zoo's crane enclosure. The vandal or vandals have not been identified as of February 14. Monitoring and attempts to recapture Soon after its escape, zoo staff began efforts to recapture Flaco, monitoring him around the clock for the first several days. Owls are generally difficult to capture. A typical strategy is to lure them with food, and zoo employees tried without success to bait Flaco with dead rats. The first attempt was with a bal-chatri trap, a baited trap covered in wire loops which snare a bird's talons when they try to get to the prey. It was placed on the park's Heckscher Ballfields, with zoo staff hidden nearby with nets. Flaco did go for the rat and briefly got one of his talons caught, but managed to free himself. The employees were instructed not to speak to the press, but several anonymously expressed frustration and exhaustion in news reports. Public attention to Flaco in Central Park quickly led to national news coverage and comparisons to other New York City "celebrity" birds like the mandarin duck seen in Central Park in 2018. ABC News wrote that he had become the city's newest tourist attraction. Zoo officials and some other birders criticized the sharing of the bird's location on social media. Publicly sharing the location of owls is a controversial practice among birders, and in New York City in particular. Owls like Flaco are nocturnal hunters and roost during the day, when crowds of people, some of whom even make loud sounds like hooting to get their attention for a photograph, can disturb their ability to rest. The crowds which formed to look at Flaco may have also made him less likely to take food from the zoo's traps. Local birders and zoo officials speculated that Flaco would have a difficult time surviving after such a long time in captivity, since he did not have reason to develop his flight and hunting skills in that