Wayward peacock back home in New York zoo

A peacock that escaped from the Central Park Zoo and tried to move on up to fancier digs on Manhattan's East Side has flown back home.

The two-year-old peacock flew the figurative coop Tuesday and promptly found a perch across the street, on a fifth-floor window ledge at swanky 838 Fifth Ave., a pre-war luxury condo building where an apartment reportedly sold for $22.5 million in 2009.

It stayed there for hours as a crowd assembled to take cell phone pictures. Two onlookers even tried to lure it down with hand signals and whistles, but the unnamed peacock wouldn't budge.

Zookeepers said the peacock posed no danger to anyone and can fly quite well. They asked anyone who spotted him "not to follow or harass the bird."

"Peafowl routinely roost high in trees at dusk and stay there until dawn," zoo director Jeff Sailer said in a statement Tuesday evening.

"Home is a short flight across the avenue and we think our peacock will make his way across soon."

And so it has, reports CBS News Correspondent Elaine Quijano.

In a city where unusual sights are hardly unusual, the peacock was enough to turn New Yorkers' heads.

"I've never seen a peacock on Fifth Avenue before. ... I didn't think peacocks were flying birds," Bill Salvas, of Weehawken, N.J., told CBS News.

"It's just like you look up and there's a big peacock sitting on a window sill. It's pretty awesome, though," observed Bronx resident Cassie Altreche.

It's been a rebellious season in the city zoos. In March, a venomous Egyptian cobra was found nearly a week after it went missing from the Bronx Zoo's Reptile House. Two months later, a peahen bolted from the zoo and was found in an auto-body shop nearby.

And, like the cobra before it, the peacock amassed a Twitter following, including two people posing as the peacock, with one, hamed BirdOnTheTown, proclaiming, "I escaped the zoo because I was sick of the tourists."