AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
The past year, there's been a mysterious invasion of ducks in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood. They come in all colors and are the size of a dime with a small magnet on the bottom. But the person or people leaving them has been a mystery until now. From member station WNYC in New York, Stephen Nessen quacks - I mean, cracks the case.
STEPHEN NESSEN, BYLINE: Stop by any playground in Chelsea and ask kids if they know about these little toy ducks.
LULU: There's, like, hundreds of them.
ADA: There's so many.
LULU: There's, like, hundreds of them on the street. And they're really cool to collect.
NESSEN: That's 10-year-old Lulu.
ADA: To me it's like a scavenger hunt but not planned really.
NESSEN: Her friend Ada is also a major collector. The kids' parents asked us not to use their last names.
LULU: You are just waiting for your adult to get off the phone, and you're bored, so you're, like, just looking around, and then you spot them.
ADA: Yeah. It's like a mystery because they're just left around town. I don't know...
NESSEN: It's a mystery I've been trying to solve since last year when I got a tip that the person I should look for is an older man named Brian. I was told he dresses well and frequently goes to one coffee shop. So I left my business card there. I left lots of cards and stopped by regularly, but I never caught him. It turns out I should have had my eye out for another person.
How's it going?
JJ CERILLO: Good. How are you?
NESSEN: Good. Good to meet you.
CERILLO: I have...
NESSEN: That's JJ Cerillo.
CERILLO: Otherwise known as the duck person.
NESSEN: We meet in Chelsea on a recent afternoon. Cerillo is a 52-year-old dog walker. She has close-cropped hair and wears dark sunglasses. Recently, she started an Instagram page to document the ducks. That's how I found her. But is she connected to Brian?
CERILLO: Brian's, like, the genius. Like, you were looking for Brian. He's very elusive. He's kind of like Bigfoot.
NESSEN: But Cerillo was able to find him.
CERILLO: I ran into him. And what he was doing is he was putting up little ducks with Santa Claus hats on. And he had a handful of them. And I thought, wow, let me approach him and see what's going on. And I was like, are you the duck guy?
NESSEN: He admitted, yeah, it was him.
CERILLO: From there, I decided to go on a much larger scale and kind of just filled this whole Chelsea with ducks everywhere.
NESSEN: The pocket of her puffy jacket is bulging with magnetic ducks and other creatures. She casually fishes out one toy and stealthily places it on a stop sign. Another goes on a railing in front of a thick bush.
CERILLO: I stick them in there so that people really have to look to find them.
NESSEN: Cerillo glues a magnet to the bottom of each little duck by hand.
CERILLO: It helps me to stay kind of centered and balanced and quiet. It just quiets my mind.
NESSEN: She estimates, since last year when she started, she's dropped off nearly 30,000 ducks.
CERILLO: It's a very expensive venture. And I guess if I had anything, it would be just something like a little duck fund. You know, GoDuckMe.
NESSEN: Like any good mystery, once one case is solved, another one walks in the door. Last month, an oversized lunch box appeared in Chelsea, attached to a parking sign. On the outside, it says library. On the inside, there are shelves of little ducks. It says, give a duck, take a duck. Cerillo insists she didn't do it. Was it another duck dropper or this Brian character? Time to beat the street and find out. For NPR News, I'm Stephen Nessen in New York.
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