Metro

Rogue peacock flies back home

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(Lawrence Schwartzwald)

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It was a jungle in there — so a peacock at the Central Park Zoo hopped the fence to trade in his dirt-floor digs for a tony Fifth Avenue perch yesterday before returning home this morning.

The beautiful escapee left a fifth-floor window ledge at 6:45 a.m., nearly 24 hours after he first flew the coop, and flew directly across the street into the goat pen at the zoo.

After several workers tried coaxing the bird into a net near his pen, one crew member left the gate open for the wandering fowl. The bird leisurely strolled back home this morning at 7:25.

The stunning, blue- and green-plumed bird had gingerly landed on a window ledge of posh 838 Fifth Ave. at around noon. He then spent hours prancing around on it as a crowd of gawkers swelled below.

“He’s having a great time,” bystander Ashish Mahajan marveled yesterday.

“He keeps looking at the window, either admiring himself or maybe he sees some food or a pretty lady inside,” Mahajan said.

Red-faced zoo officials said the male bird escaped at around 9 a.m.

The peacock then wandered around the Upper East Side for a few hours before claiming his new luxury home — with billionaire neighbors including Seagrams heir Charles Bronfman and Toll Brothers construction magnate Bruce Toll — and stopped enough cars for the NYPD to divert a couple of traffic agents from Queens.

“We expect to see a lot of things in New York City, but not this!” said Kate Spence, 29, a teacher visiting from Vancouver.

Zoo employees were clueless as to how the bird escaped.

“All the peacocks are kept in netted areas. None of them are allowed to roam completely freely,” one worker said. “But hey, they’ve got wings right? . . . He’s moving on up!”

The jailbreak brought three zoo officials to the scene. The apartment owner was away, a doorman said. The bird finally called it a night and fell asleep on the ledge at around 9 p.m. — and officials appeared resigned to wait him out.

Twitter users quickly opened joke accounts for the bird.

One tweet suggested he’ll stay on Fifth Avenue. “I escaped the zoo because I was stick of the tourists,” it read. “So Times Square probably wouldn’t be a good idea.”

The bird’s flight for freedom was the third embarrassing escape from a city zoo this year.

In April, a cobra was on the loose for six days at the Bronx Zoo. A month later, a peahen flew the coop there.

The Wildlife Conservation Society runs both zoos.

Additional reporting by Frank Rosario, AP