Lessons from Flaco ’ s Flight
New York City photographs taken on 2023-02-18 Files by Rhododendrite
Image by Nan Knighton
These images are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license .
by VASUDEVA IYER , MD
The art and science of medical pedagogy , more specifically bedside teaching , has been of much interest to me . Even after 50 years at it , I still debate in my mind about the ideal strategy for imparting highly complex medical knowledge to the novice . A sense of achievement and joy ( akin to the exhilaration from abundant endorphin release ) occurs when a devoted teacher realizes that the student finally understood a highly complex topic . It is even more gratifying when the student expresses his or her appreciation of the teacher ’ s effort . I was pleasantly surprised to get a telephone call from an old student on Teachers ’ Day expressing her indebtedness to me for my role in teaching and mentoring her . I was also much pleased to learn that she holds a faculty appointment in a medical school in New York pursuing clinical work , research and teaching . While chatting about life in New York City , we happened to hit on a topic that has recently attracted my attention : the adventures and the recent sad demise of Flaco the owl .
26 LOUISVILLE MEDICINE
Although Flaco became an obsession of New Yorkers , many of you may not have known or followed his story . Flaco is the bird that escaped from the Central Park Zoo in February of 2023 and eventually became the talk of the town . He was a Eurasian eagle-owl ( Bubo bubo ) born in captivity and has been an attraction at the Zoo for several years . When he escaped captivity ( due to an act of vandalism ) and later defied attempts at recapture , there were questions raised about his chance of survival in the big metropolis . His subsequent appearance at a Fifth Avenue sidewalk drew much publicity and attracted a large fan base with a frenzy to record and report in social media every one of Flaco ’ s sightings . Surprisingly , Flaco was able to survive for almost a year beating all odds ; then came the sad end , apparently having struck a building during flight . It was a painful eye opener to all ornithophiles and renewed the debate : how to prevent the death of millions of birds in flight from hitting buildings through adoption of “ bird-friendly building design .”
To stop ruminating over Flaco ’ s sad fate I tried one of my favorite distraction techniques : explore medically applicable lessons that can be learned from that incident . At the outset I wondered if only Flaco had possessed the gift of echolocation ( determining the location of objects from reflected sound waves , a unique skill , highly advanced in bats ), maybe he could have avoided the fatal collision . However , studies have shown that even bats sometimes collide after being tricked by smooth vertical surfaces which may be interpreted as open spaces . 1 Nature has endowed not only the bats , but also other species such as certain whales and dolphins with the ability to echolocate ; this brings up the logical question : can humans echolocate ? In this context , I am reminded of a patient I saw decades ago , who suffered from congenital blindness and a seizure disorder . Once the seizures were controlled with medications , the parents brought up another concern : the patient had the annoying habit of making “ weird clicking sounds ” repeatedly , while walking . At that time ,