There’s a peacock who roams around my neighborhood in a Portland suburb. At some point, someone started calling him Kevin and the name stuck. A few years ago, I was in my yard when I heard the unmistakable cry of a peacock. It sounded a bit like someone yelling “owww” into an echoing canyon. (Click here to hear some peacocks for yourself.) I walked to the end of the driveway and saw him, Kevin, in the neighbor’s yard. His tailfeathers were a bit raggedy—maybe he was young or just going through a rough molt—but he tried to fan them out all the same. He turned in a slow circle. Kevin was trying to find love. Sadly he didn’t have much luck on my block. Maybe that’s why he never came back.
Any sighting of a male peacock prompts posts on NextDoor about Kevin. Just last week someone posted a photo of a peacock looking at his reflection in a large stained-glass window and wrote, “Poor lonely Kevin. He has been enthralled by his reflection in our yard art all morning.” Sometimes someone posts a location of a sighting asking, “Is this your peacock?” only to get a flood of responses about the feral birds that have been here for decades. Peacocks—plural. Because Kevin has a doppelganger or five or ten or twenty. It’s hard to say how many peacocks there are at large in Portland’s suburbs (not to mention peahens). Everyone just calls them Kevin. At some point someone’s pet peacocks got loose and thrived or survived in Portland’s usually mild climate. I’ve heard people say the birds have been here as long as fifty years. (The collective noun for a group of peacocks is an “ostentation”.)
They seem almost universally beloved where I live. Because the peacocks roam, particularly during mating season, it’s a special thing to have one stop by in your yard. Sometimes they stay a while, hanging out on fences or rooftops or fighting their reflections in picture windows, but often they’re there one moment and gone the next. People seem to accept the possibility of scratches on their cars, loud noises early in the morning, or mussed up flowers for the chance to see the flamboyant tail of a peacock spread wide.
That’s not the case everywhere. There are feral peacock colonies all over the United States and other countries too. They can be beloved tourist attractions or a rampaging menace so dire residents have to arm themselves with water pistols before leaving their homes. Southern California seems to have a particularly contentious relationship with their local peafowl. Some years back, the wealthy city of Palos Verdes, California was shaken up by a series of vicious peacock murders. Over fifty of these birds were killed or injured over the course of two years; the murderer was never found. More recently, the problem has moved to Los Angeles County where tensions over the birds have run so high that the LA County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously to ban feeding the fowl. According to a Washington Post article, removing nuisance peafowl wasn’t much of a priority during the pandemic so the birds were left to multiply and, perhaps more importantly, residents were home to hear their loud calls. Peacock relocator Mark Maxcey charges $200 to remove one bird. It’s the most polarizing thing I’ve ever been involved with,” he told the Washington Post. “Seventy percent of the population hate them and want them out….Thirty percent love and cherish them.”
Peacock expert Dennis Fett told Slate that he didn’t think the feeding ban alone would solve the peacock problem since there are so many other food sources for the birds—wild bird feeders, outdoor cat food, or even compost bins. “You either capture them out of existence or learn to live with them,” he said.
The blue peafowl that people usually think of when they think of peacocks are native to India and were brought around the world because of their beauty. There are a lot of theories about who the first person was to introduce the birds in certain areas but no one really knows for sure. (The introduction of starlings and house sparrows, on the other hand, have been unanimously traced back to Shakespeare enthusiasts in the 19th century who wanted to have the birds mentioned in the Bard’s plays in America.) Most of today’s nuisance animals are here because at one point someone thought they were beautiful, useful, or a bit of both.
For a few years as a child when I lived on an island in the Puget Sound, I had a pet peacock who I named Shiva. He was in love with my mother and liked to follow her around, displaying his feathers in the parking lot. Every night he flew up into the trees behind our house to roost. In the early morning, he came back down and sat outside her bedroom window to call as the sun rose. We moved and left him behind with the new owners. Many years later I heard that he’d disappeared. Likely a snack for some local coyotes. As far as I can tell, no feral peacock colonies have sprung up on the island thanks to our free-roaming bird. (Instead there’s a large population of feral rabbits.)
We tend to love domesticated animals (there’s a reason why we bring them into our homes or yards) but our feelings toward them can shift abruptly once they go feral and are without owners. Maybe we just like knowing there’s someone to complain to about an animal’s bad behavior. Maybe we’re uncomfortable with the fact that despite all our efforts at domestication, they can thrive without our care.
Technically it’s illegal to own peafowl in my neighborhood so the only way to enjoy them is to hope one of these lawless creatures stumbles onto my block. Occasionally I’ve biked around the neighborhood to places where Kevin was recently spotted. I have yet to find him when I’m looking for him. It’s always a surprise. It’s hard not to feel like it all means something, a sign from someone. You’ve been blessed by Kevin. Look upon him while you can.
News from the Coop
If you read the news in the last week you probably heard that we had some hot weather here in the Pacific Northwest. On Monday it got up to 116 degrees. It was too hot for the chickens and my little white porcelain D’uccle Scully was panting and gasping for air when it was only 103 in a way that makes me pretty sure she would have been a casualty of the heat if I hadn’t brought her into my basement shower. The other seven chickens rode out the heatwave there too. It took…a lot of cleaning and bleach to get the chicken out but the bathroom is back to normal. The weather is too. As I’m writing this there’s actually a drizzle outside.
Unfortunately, I doubt this is the last unusual weather event we’ll have this summer. In British Columbia, a town that got up to 121 degrees during the heatwave is now on fire. There are fires all over. When the sky got cloudy and strangely humid yesterday my first thought wasn’t that rain was on the horizon, it was that maybe wildfire smoke was rolling in again.
When I moved back to the Pacific Northwest five years ago, I thought I’d be relatively sheltered from the worst effects of climate change—at least for a while. The region has had other plans. It’s not a great time to have animals who live outside and I feel for everyone who had to venture out into the heat over and over and over to keep their animals shaded and watered and cooled, knowing that they might lose a few anyway. Many people did.
I wrote a bit about what it was like during the heatwave for The Washington Post. Maybe you’d like to give it a read?
If you need a chicken fix before the next newsletter, you can follow me on Twitter or Instagram.
If you liked this email, please share the newsletter with a chicken or animal lover in your life! As always, email me at underthehenfluence@gmail.com with any tips or comments. See you next month.
-Tove