Peafowl Primer - Chapter One: Feathers

When we inherited a flock of six adult peacocks last summer (they came with the house…actually written into the contract), I did what any former city girl and novice peaherder would do—I went to the Internet. I was startled at how little information is out there. I emailed the former homeowners relentlessly, but once the restraining order was in place, I turned to Amazon and ordered the only book on peacock care I could find. I was disappointed to find out it was a slim tome written by a guy who’d once had a few birds, about how much he “liked ‘em.” There were a couple of websites, but nothing I found seemed complete—for example, I couldn’t find anything that told me typical peachick color/feather markings, and whether that indicated the chicks’ sex.

So I’ve decided to blog my own peafowl primer. Granted, it’s anecdotal, but I’m dangerously obsessive about closely observing our little flock—the neighborhood’s abuzz with rumors of “that weirdo” with the binoculars and bag of Funyums who crouches in the spirea bushes. And hey, I figure if I was a total pea-gnoramus, then whatever I can offer will help other pea-gnoramuses (pea-gnorami?).

Peafowl come originally from India, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia. In the wild, they’re forest-dwellers, with a dominant male having a harem of females. In the barnyards of South Dakota, males will take whatever they can get.

The most common peafowl is the India Blue, the bird with which most of us are familiar. There are also greens, pieds (mottled with white), albino whites, and other varieties. Males have that amazing “train” of tail feathers that includes long, wispy iridescent “eye” and “sword” feathers, held up when they display by a fan of shorter, stiff, dull-brown feathers (see Francoise in the picture, shown from behind, displaying for a lawn chair, poor dear). Wing feathers are brown or white with black bars, and they have a bank of russet feathers on their lower sides, which they beat rapidly when displaying—more crazy peafowl percussion. Their long necks are iridescent blue-green. Legs are featherless, beige, with heavy-duty nails and a bony “spur” on the inside of each leg a few inches above the foot, used for mid-air sword-fighting with other males.

India Blue peahens are mostly brown with barred or plain brown wing feathers, white chest feathers, an iridescent greenish sheen on their upper necks, and short dull-brown tails (see pic of Junior, an immature male with no train, and Debbie on the fence). Peachicks can be a variety of colors, I'm learning, but in the two seasons we've had chicks, the females have ended up looking identical to adult hens by the end of the first summer, while male chicks remain a variety of colors (see Ike, Tina, and Wilke in the greenhouse window—Ike is a yearling now and still mostly white; Tina is identical to all the other females; Wilke, colored like Ike, met an untimely predatory end). Ike is a year old now and still white, although we don’t know yet if that means he's a male or that he’s a mutant and will stay white. Of Wanda’s four new babies, two already look like adult females, and two are cream, rust and brown, although again, we don't know if that means they're males. Debbie and Mitzi's chicks are clearly females. All peafowl have a topknot that consists of a cluster of erect, bare feather shafts tipped by tiny iridescent blue fan feathers.

Peacocks are sexually mature at 2-3 years, although males have a comical train the first year, with a few scraggly eye feathers sticking up here & there. The hens gather around the birdbath, point and snicker. The mature males kick sand at the poor guy. Peacocks drop all of their long tail feathers in a week or two in late July when the breeding season is over, so we make daily rounds to gather the feathers. They grow a new train over the winter and are ready to go again in early spring. Each year the train is more impressive, fuller and with bigger “eyes,” until the peacock is in his prime.

Both males and females can raise their tails. Without a train, this looks a lot like a turkey spreading its tail fan, and peacocks will fan when startled or to threaten small, delinquent puppies.

When the boys do their courtship thing, which they’ll do for just about anything—females, yard art, dogs, wind, lawn mowers (see Ramon’s ironic wooing of the Virgin Mary)—they fan their train and vibrate the feathers, making a sound like a soft drum roll, which they alternate with the rapid staccato beating of the russet side feathers. When they really get going, they’ll high-step in a halting march toward the object of their affection with neck erect, head bowed, and train fluttering. They also do a fancy back-stepping dance, and if a hen ventures really close, they charge. The whole process is remarkably similar to the courtship behavior of first-year college students with fake IDs in a downtown bar. Only waaaay prettier.