Animals: Cock of the Walk

Terrified by the appearance of what she thought was a buzzard at her window, an apartment dweller in Manhattan’s West 58th Street one morning last week called police.

When they arrived the bird had flown to the roof of a nearby undertaking establishment where he spread an iridescent tail, fan-fashion, to show his pursuers he was a peacock not a vulture. He remained there until a policeman reached the roof, then took wing, flapped his way to the Hotel Wyndham, paused until his pursuers were in roping distance, flew away once more.

Traffic halted on Fifth Avenue, sleepy heads appeared from swank hotel windows as the peacock soared thrice around the gilded rooster atop the Heckscher Building, then to a window ledge on the seventeenth floor of the Hotel Plaza. There, as raucous cries arose from the Central Park Bird Sanctuary, he took off again, landing finally in the sanctuary beside four squawking peahens which had been widowed fortnight before.