A spirited peacock may have ruffled some feathers during a brief escape from New York City’s Bronx Zoo on Wednesday night.
Emergency medical workers fielded a call around 8pm reporting that a man had been bitten by a peacock blocks away from the famous zoo, NBC New York reported.
The man, who had a minor injury and declined hospital treatment, was seen on a video posted to the Citizen app describing his encounter with the wayward bird.
“I thought I was buggin,’” the man said, recalling the moment he saw the roaming peacock.
He described how he and others tried to corral the peacock in an attempt to protect the bird.
“It started running up the hill towards traffic, so we had to try and keep the bird safe,” he said. “We chased him all the way in. I trapped him inside the gate.”
Once the bird was inside the gate, “he tried to peck me and grabbed my pants,” the man said. “Then the motherfucker flew in the tree!”
The peacock spent the night in the tree. Thursday morning, the bird “flew back onto zoo grounds under his own initiative,” the Bronx Zoo said in a news release.
“We kept an eye on the bird this morning as he started to move around at dawn and fully expected him to return to the zoo as he did,” the zoo said. “We had confidence in our knowledge of bird behavior to predict how he would behave if given the chance to do so without interference.”
Peacocks at the zoo roam freely around the grounds, where the zoo emphasised they pose no threat to visitors. The escaped peacock likely felt threatened by the man’s attempt to contain him.
“Peafowl are not dangerous,” the zoo said in a statement to ABC 7 New York. “Like many other animals, peafowl rely on a flight response when they feel threatened. But like any animal, when cornered, they may react and peck to protect themselves.”