That’s not a particularly short story, but if you might have noticed in my abbreviated bio on my intro. page, (Introducing Dale Cutler - #3 by AllenWitmerMiller), I am confident of God’s personal interventionist activity into my life. (I keep a log, a ‘field researcher’s notebook’, of empirical evidence of one of his most commom M.O.s.) So you will have to bear with me and try and project into my mindset. That will be difficult for any nontheist, since it is completely foreign to their confirmation bias (we all have confirmation biases, but not all biases are correct 
).
Trying to make a long story shorter, not only does God providentially direct my paths and provide my needs, but he also gives me gifts of amazing timing and placing for my enjoyment, as a loving father would give surprise gifts to a beloved child (and I do call him ‘Father’). More development on that is in order, but the mandarin duck is exemplary of one of those.
So the shortened version is that I saw a solitary male mandarin duck in the wild on a gray and chilly day in the middle of November of '04, swimming in the weir pool of the disused Werdinsel mill on the Limmat River in Zürich, Switzerland… Just(?!) the timing of it and me being then and where (and the remarkable nature of the why and when could be expounded upon further.) That duck did knock my eyes out, so to speak!
It’s interesting that one has been in the national news very recently, seen in Central Park, NYC. It was kind of a big deal.