The Central Park Pond's newly-arrived male Mandarin Duck (we still do not know how it got here) unseated the Wood Duck as prettiest duck in the park. Gus Keri brings us close-up videopic.twitter.com/cauqVt4kSK ||||| On Tuesday afternoon, Mr. Barrett, 54, returned to the Pond to check on the Mandarin duck. Carrying binoculars, Mr. Barrett, who works as an investor and computer scientist when he’s not birding, circled the shore trying to spot the glamorous creature. 
 
 After many minutes of fruitless searching, he spotted the duck nestled near a rock across the Pond, on the eastern shore of the Hallett Nature Sanctuary. 
 
 Joined by a fellow birder on a lunch break from her day job, Mr. Barrett began to strategize how he’d coax the duck from the other side, which was thick with trees and shadows in the late afternoon. “We need to be enterprising,” he said. 
 
 First, the pair of birders tried to entice him. Mr. Barrett purchased a salted soft pretzel from a cart in the park, ripping off tiny pieces and tossing them off the shore. No luck. 
 
 The second birder, Sandra Critelli, muttered that she needed to get back to the office soon. “But that damn duck!” she said. 
 
 As his next option, Mr. Barrett tried to chase the duck away from its nook on the distant side of the Pond. After walking around the Pond to the forested nature sanctuary, Mr. Barrett climbed around trees and over branches to reach the shore. Then, he began to quack. 
 
 Yes, quack. And soon, a small group of ducks began to swim out of the shadows. 
 
 Mr. Barrett sprinted over the bridge and back to the other side of the Pond. By the time he got there, the Mandarin duck was already basking in the sun with his mallard friends, posing for awe-struck onlookers with cameras.
– If there's anywhere you'll see a punk rocker with a "multicolored mohawk," New York City would be the place. But the Mandarin duck that's been hanging out in Central Park since mid-October is another story entirely. The New York Times reports the creature with brilliantly hued plumage was first spotted Oct. 10 and has since gone viral, with spectators all vying for pictures of an animal usually seen only in East Asia. For now, the duck's origins remain a mystery: None of the city's zoos have this type of duck missing from the roster, and it's illegal in NYC to keep a duck as a pet. That means the duck perhaps escaped from, say, an owner in New Jersey and made its way to the city, or maybe the owner itself got sick of the duck and unceremoniously left it and ran. Either way, the duck has been a huge hit. "It's just an incredible gift to New York," one birder tells CBS New York. Avian experts believe that based on its feeding habits—it likes bugs and vegetation skimmed from the water's surface—the duck should be able to survive just fine in the Big Apple, and park officials say they're just going to let it be unless it becomes injured. It already appears to have made friends with the park's mallards. Read more on how a pair of eager birders tried (and ultimately succeeded) to coax the duck to come closer for pictures, including with a hot pretzel from a nearby cart and, yes, quacking. (The search for a pink-headed duck in Myanmar.)