EARLIER: A peacock escaped from the Central Park Zoo and was on the loose on the Upper East Side Tuesday afternoon, zoo officials confirmed.
“The peacock poses no danger to anyone,” the zoo said in a statement emailed shortly after 2 p.m. “To ensure a good outcome in this situation, we ask everyone not to follow or harass the bird if they see him.”
“We are hopeful he will either fly back to the zoo or we will retrieve him nearby,” the statement added.
Zoo officials were on hand at the scene to monitor the situation. It was not immediately clear how the peacock escaped the zoo.
Roughly 50 onlookers watched the bird as he sat perched upon a fourth floor of 838 Fifth Ave. near East 65th Street, a multmillion-dollar apartment building, about 2:30 p.m. Tuesday.
“These kinds of things you don’t see everyday," Alistair Reid, 36, a native Londoner who is spending the year on the Upper East Side remarked. "Only in New York.”
Others posted pictures of the wayward bird to Twitter.
“There's a peacock hanging out a window on 5th avenue across from the central park zoo #OnlyInNYC,” Twitter user Rachel Klein announced about 12 p.m.
“Just saw a peacock chilling on the windowsill on the fifth floor across the street from Central Park Zoo,” Brittany Villalona tweeted roughly one hour later. “You know someone's getting #fired”
A Twitter feed for the peacock popped up soon after, a la the cobra that escaped the Bronx Zoo earlier this year, joking about the bird's escape.
"Does anyone know how I can get to 30 Rock?" @BirdOnTheTown tweeted. "A lot of people forget that peacocks aren't just beautiful... we can fly too. Ha!"
Police were at the scene watching the peacock for several hours Tuesday afternoon, but left about 3 p.m. There were no visible efforts underway to capture the bird as of 4 p.m.
"Somebody should write a book about this, 'Peacock in the Big City'," said Hana Raskin, 21, who lives in the East Village.
Read more at DNAINFO.COM