An ostentatious intruder ran afoul of authorities after a broken window was discovered on the south side of Rand Hall on June 6.

A peacock -- an escapee from a Cayuga Heights estate -- broke into the building around 5 p.m. and was discovered in a second-floor computer lab, said Peter Turner, assistant dean of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning.

"I had some backup in case the peacock got rough," said Officer James Morrissette of Cornell University police, who responded to the break-in at 5:30 p.m. "In 29 years here I've had a lot of animal calls, but this was my first peacock."

"The glass was incredibly thick, and the window pane was not very big," Morrissette said. "There were some feathers about and broken glass, but no blood, and a peacock strutting about."

For Turner, the bird's invasion prompted a flashback to a previous job as vice president of learning support at Royal Roads University in Victoria, B.C., where he had to deal with about 80 resident peacocks.

"They are extremely noisy at all hours of the day, and they can make a huge mess. We had all these issues related to peacocks. And as an administrator, I had to solve these issues. My boss once jokingly called me 'vice president of peacocks,'" Turner said. "So my first thought was, 'here I go, assistant dean of peacocks,' as I walked over there. I was saying to myself, 'Peter, how is this happening? How did this peacock find you?'"

The Rand Hall bird, described by Morrissette as "a 2-year-old Indian peacock, beautiful deep blue with turquoise," had apparently strayed from the Cayuga Heights estate of Dorothy Park, about a mile-and-a-half away, and had been at large for days.

The Parks' gardener, Fritz Schmidt, was summoned to retrieve the bird and arrived with a cage and net at 6:20 p.m. "The bird didn't want to be caught," Morrissette said. "It kind of flew around the computer lab, put up some resistance."

Although peacocks can fly short distances and heights, "It didn't look to me like that accomplished a flyer, that it could get up to that window," Morrissette said. "But it did, and it looked pretty proud -- as proud as a peacock, you might say."