The Hot Duck That Won’t Go Away

NEW YORK — We’re sorry, but this is another article about that pretty duck in Central Park.

Within the past month, the Mandarin duck — sometimes called the “hot duck” — has become an international celebrity. A living, breathing, quacking meme. It has been difficult to scroll through Twitter without seeing a photo of his magnificent multicolored plumage.

He has been featured on prime time news and discussed on late-night talk shows. His likeness has been stamped on T-shirts. Even the official mouthpiece of the Chinese Communist Party saw him fit for a tweet. On Sunday, he landed on the front page of The Los Angeles Times, which speculated that he was an escapee from a private aviary.

With each new burst of media attention, crowds jostled each other around the edge of the Central Park Pond just to catch a glimpse. The duck has been captured at nearly every angle and endowed with a multitude of internet voices.

When he can’t immediately be found, his fans worry. When he takes a side trip to New Jersey, they fear he’s turning into a suburbanite. And when he’s caught nipping at the back of one of his mallard companions, they wonder: Is this the duck we thought we knew? Could he be a “Milkshake Duck”? (Look it up.)

There is one cohort of New Yorkers who are slightly less amused: serious birders. The ones who ogled ducks in Central Park before it was cool.

On the whole, they are thrilled that this duck could draw outsiders into the broader world of bird-watching. Sean Sime, who has been birding in the city for more than 20 years, called him a “spark bird,” a fantastic creature that brings newcomers into the fold.

At the same time, the Mandarin fixation has left a bit of a sour taste, Sime said. Birding is about taking in the natural world, and the internet-fueled popularity of the duck is anything but natural. The Mandarin is essentially the “Kim Kardashian of ducks,” he added.

“It’s like manufactured hysteria,” he said. “From a native wildlife sentiment, it’s like reality TV. It’s not a wild bird that should be here.”

Because the duck is not believed to have reached the city naturally, birders can’t add him on their “life list,” a record of wild birds that an individual has seen, said Matthew Rymkiewicz, another local enthusiast. He worries about the behavior of the duck’s fans. “It’s a wild animal,” he said. “So respect it and have boundaries.”

When my editors assigned a story about the duck a month ago, his origin was a mystery, and it still is. Mandarin ducks are native to East Asia, not North America, so experts concluded that the duck was likely an abandoned or escaped pet.

While other publications had noted his incongruous presence in Central Park, attention from The Times pushed the bird into superstardom.

Many birders online took issue with the article’s description of a fellow birder, David Barrett, who used a soft pretzel to try to coax the Mandarin to the shore and then, when that failed, chased him from one end of the pond with some convincing quacks.

Sime said that behavior made birders cringe because it went against a widely accepted birder ethical code.

Barrett, the creator and manager of the Twitter account Manhattan Bird Alert, can be fairly described as the duck’s kingmaker. He said his strategies for bringing the duck closer to shore were exceptions, and he has subsequently promoted healthy duck-watching behavior. (But, he added, it’s not as if he pioneered the idea of feeding bread to ducks.)

As for the duck’s internet stardom, Barrett doesn’t see a problem. “What’s unhealthy about people liking a beautiful, natural thing?”

But as the duck turned into a bona fide star, some of us worried that the obsession would take a sinister turn. That someone who loved him a bit too much would steal him away. That a hawk would swoop down and pick him up by the scruff of his neck. (The Urban Park Rangers assured me they check on the bird’s safety regularly.)

For now, the duck seems content to winter in New York City and could, like so many other transplants, make the city his permanent home. Theoretically, the Mandarin could mate with a native duck, an ornithologist with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology said, although it’s unclear if they could produce offspring.

Perhaps, with time, the novelty will wear off. On Friday afternoon, a light crowd of about a dozen people closely watched the Mandarin duck float serenely atop the water of the Pond, apparently napping as a sprinkling of rain made the water around him ripple. We watched him swim toward rocks near the shore, on top of which some mallards were dozing.

He climbed out of the water and indulged in some post-nap grooming on the rock’s edge. Apparently dissatisfied with his spot, he snapped his bill at two mallards sleeping with their heads nestled in their feathers.

They flapped away, and the Mandarin took his place at the rock’s highest point, looking regal, and magnificently out of place.