Peacock Roundup...YEEHAW!

I’m drawn to parenthood the way some people are drawn to cliff edges—zombie-like with an idiot grin & glassy-eyed stare. Last week, for example, we got a new puppy, Yogi, a seven-week-old Schnoodle. We got him as a companion for our seven-year-old Australian Shepherd, Jada, and we figured if Yogi ended up sprouting a few poodle-icious curls, he’d also make a decent sheep substitute for Jada. Because Jada is the smartest dog on the planet and mostly trained herself, I’d forgotten that having a new puppy is a lot like raising a human from birth to age three except condensed into a single exhausting, relentless, sleepless month—walking, running, scrubbing, washing, babytalking, unhooking household objects and/or furniture from little needle-teeth, blending, chopping, blanching, boiling…one foot over the precipice & don’t look down.

In addition to puppy chores, it’s peacock nesting season here at Uncannery Row. A crash course in peafowl parenting: males strut their stuff beginning in March or April. Hens go off to an undisclosed location in June, where they nest on the ground, well-hidden in tall grass out beyond their usual stomping grounds. Peachicks hatch 28 days later and can fly immediately. The hen doesn’t feed them—like chickens, they must learn to feed themselves from the beginning. The hen keeps them safe and warm under her wings at night, but she teaches them to roost within the first week or two by flying up in a tree near the nest and calling to the chicks until they fly up, too. She keeps them away from the farmyard, humans, and other peacocks for the first couple weeks, then only introduces them to the flock & home grounds for an increasing few minutes each day. It may be two months before she’ll let them roost in the communal tree, hang with the rest of the flock, or come without shouting distance of humans.

When we bought our place last year, we inherited a flock of six adult India Blues. We named them (as compulsive parents do): Francoise, Mimi, Ramon, Wanda, Junior and Debbie. Wanda went to nest sometime before we moved in on June 15. All was well, Nature in perfect balance— Wanda was the only hen that nested last year, somewhere behind the barn. When the babies hatched, she kept them out of sight and taught them the enigmatic Peacock Way. Of the three chicks, two survived the winter, so now we are eight, as A. A. Milne would say, with the addition of Ike and Flannery.

We should have let Nature take Her wise & careful course. But no. Concerned about their welfare over the brutal South Dakota winter, I fed the peacocks corn, black oil sunflower, and cat food (high protein), and Ray rigged up a brooder light in the loafing shed, where the flock would roost on the bitterest winter nights. Thanks to our kindly intervention, all three adult hens nested this year. Around the last week of June, Wanda, abandoning the cautious Peacock Way, brought six healthy peachicks up to the house to say howdy and to show them where I toss the corn. Now she marches them around the yard daily (blurry pic of Wanda in the yard, six babies under her).

Then last Friday, we discovered Mimi and four hatchlings in a lovely nest in our window well. When after two days of coaxing she could only get one chick to hop out, she abandoned the nest to start teaching the lone freed chick to find food. We tried not to listen all the next day to the weakening peeping of the remaining three chicks, but finally, Ray pulled them out of the well. They’re wiggly and pop right out of your hands, so we spent an hour rounding them up in the rose bushes, then put them out by the garden in a horse tank where Mimi could hear them and easily get to them. Yesterday, we saw her stroll through the yard with two chicks in tow. I think Snowball, the healthy pregnant mama barn cat (just a little bit of cat food to get the poor kitties through the winter, for gosh sakes), “adopted” the other two.

So now we are sixteen and counting. And there’s one more hen still on a nest. Forget naming. We’ve mucked up in a single season of misguided compulsive parenting what evolution took millions of years to perfect. It’s a whole new paradigm. We’ve plunged spread-eagle off the cliff, we’re singing “Fools Rush In” as we plummet, and it’s a looooong way down…