A friend of mine runs a local bird-park and they’ve gotten peafowl to wonder around the place.
Apparently, once they know where “home” is and they’re regularly fed they always come back. So his are wild and free. They fly off exploring during the day, come back when they’re hungry and roost in his trees.
They’ve even been known to eat the neighbour’s flowers.
He says the sight of them flying down from the trees when he comes out with food is incredible. Huge birds swooping down over his head.
I am so very jealous.
It’s a Norwegian Blue. Beau’iful plumage.
My uncle had (has?) a bunch on his farm, they are really neat birds but the calls were annoying after a while.
You’re going to be disappointed if you ever attend a cock fight.
When we were living in Carson City we were on the edge of the wild. To get to the place, you had to drive into this river valley and about two miles down one side of the valley, cross the valley floor, then back about a mile up the other side of the valley in kind of a giant U-turn. A ranch took up most of the land in the valley and right where you crossed over were the ranch buildings where they kept peafowl, among other things, by the house.
Luckily, from our house the cries were faint enough not to be annoying but we could still hear them more than a mile and a half away. One time when I took the route, there was a dead peacock right in front of the ranch house. There are few sadder-looking things than a smashed peacock.
We have some peafowl wandering through our neighborhood, joining the egrets and blue herons in the parade. Also, armadillos, alligators, various snakes, possums, and raccoons.
The one that really surprised me when I saw her was a largish guinea hen. That one was new for me.
The call sounds like a woman yelling for heeeelp!
I remember hearing that peacock is good eatin’ (similar to pheasant). If you decide to catch and eat it, please let us know how it tasted.
You’ll be the first to know.
Peafowl are everywhere; I often see them in zoos, and more recently, Tampa Bay Busch Gardens. Albino peacocks in Florida? Never thought I’d see the day.
They are amazingly beautiful, but also annoying, I agree. I remember I communicated with one at the Gardens; just shriek at one and they shriek back and we’ll all have the neighbors awake. Even better if done at six a.m on a Saturday morning.
Exactly. They have free-range peafowl at the Philadelphia Zoo. They sound like someone being murdered. It’s seriously not funny when you happen to walk under one that’s roosted up in a tree so you don’t know he’s there, and he just lets loose. I almost had an embarrassing accident…
If they breed, they can have a couple of kids. Every good peacock needs a pair of peanuts.
He finally wandered past my window this morning, so I took more pix if anyone’s interested.
Picture
Picture
Picture
The last one is a wide shot to show what my back view looks like and how far away the bird is.
You’re not stealing bandwidth. If you had linked directly to the site you would be. In otherwords if THIS page contained the WAV you would be, but since you only put in a link directing people to his site, that isn’t bandwidth theft.
Anyway in any southern rural area, in the old days, my granny tells me, they used to have lots of exotic birds. She was from the northern part of Florida, you know the real south, and they had all sorts of exotic things, because as she says, “there wasn’t always TV.”
And then some get lose and go wild. I stayed with a friend of mine in Chicago near the Lincoln Park Zoo and they have a bird exibit and they can fly out of the exibit and they visit the area around it, but I guess cause they’re too lazy too look for food, the birds always come back to the exibit.
In July two years ago (or maybe three now) a white peahen showed up in our neighbourhood. It was strange. I was sitting in the back yard, reading a book and having a cocktail or two, when I glanced up into the woods and saw it. I thought I was rather deeper into the alcohol than I’d planned to be, so I got my husband to confirm.
It was a white peahen, sure enough.
That also explained the large deposits in the driveway. (Peahen poop.) It hung around for a few months, then was glimpsed no more. But for a while, it was very strange to see her in our driveway, in my back yard, on the roof, and on the little porch off the sliding glass doors.
I put out birdseed.
Absolutely beautiful! It’s a damn good thing those beasts are so goodlooking because otherwise people would have already eliminated them to get rid of the screaming…
It’s not a song, it’s a nerve-wracking screech.
There several parts of Los Angeles infested with peacocks. Because of the screech, they’ve become a controversy in the ritzy, exclusive community of Palos Verdes Estates,
They are aggressive, that is for sure. There exists a home movie (the kind you need a reel-to-reel movie projector to show–this was the mid-1970s) of me at the Tucson zoo, which lets all the peacocks just run free. In the movie, my four-year-old self chases a peacock into a hedge. There is a comic pause and then I come tearing back out of the hedge, and a second later, so does the peacock, chasing me with murder in his eye. I’m sure it scared the crap out of me at the time, but it sure made for a funny home movie.
I thought I did link directly to the site. The url ( http: //www.tucj.com/downloads/peacock.wav ) points directly at the WAV file, not at the blog. How much more direct can it be?
Peacocks aren’t good for eating? :smack:
…and I thought that since it was Sunday that this would be a good solution:
Peacock Dinner
Need:
3 carrots, peeled and cut into thirds
3 ribs celery, peeled and cut into thirds
3 onions, peeled and cut into quarters
1 (3 1/2 to 4 pound) Peacock, plucked, gutted, rinsed and patted dry
1 1/2 tablespoons salt
2 teaspoons cracked white pepper
1 lemon, halved
2 fresh bay leaves
6 cloves garlic, roughly chopped
4 sprigs rosemary, roughly chopped, plus 1 tablespoon for gravy
2 tablespoons olive oil
2 tablespoons unsalted butter, at room temperature
1 cup chicken stock
2 tablespoons roasted garlic
1 cup dry white wine
1 Glass for Chef (refill as needed)
Preheat the oven to 500 degrees F.
In a 9 by 13-inch roasting pan, add the carrots, celery and onions. Season the chicken both inside and out with the kosher salt and white pepper. Squeeze the lemon halves over the Peacock and place the rinds inside the cavity. Place the bay leaves inside the cavity. In a small bowl, combine the garlic, rosemary, olive oil and butter. Rub the Peacock both inside and out with the garlic rosemary blend and place in the roasting pan.
Place the pan in the oven and roast the chicken for 40 to 50 minutes, or until the juices run clear. To test this, insert a thermometer in the thickest part of a leg (The Peacock’s leg, not yours). It should register at 160 degrees internal temperature. Remove the Peacock from the oven and allow to cool for 10 to 15 minutes before carving.
Pour off excess fat from pan and return to heat. Whisk in the chicken stock, roasted garlic, white wine and chopped rosemary, scraping up the bits on the bottom of pan. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Reduce gravy by half, until thickened.
Serve Peacock with gravy on the side. Goes well with Sauvignon Blanc.