Much I am sure to our neighbors’ dismay we have had a flock of peafowl for more than fifteen years. Their raucous chorus throughout mating season, day and night, March through June, has probably brought many a Colrainian to the brink of murder. The flock began when my then business partner Sarah bought a pair for her husband’s birthday. He flat out said No thanks! and so Sarafina and Marco came to live with us.
Over the years they did what any self-respecting pair of peafowl would do. Once we added a male from Tregellys so there would be a bit of new blood but mostly we let nature take her course.
Most of the time the peachicks fell prey to hawks, to one of our cats (Oh, Muizza, what a terror you can be!) or just got lost in the tall grass on one of their forays out into the fields. Then one year a fox and her kits ate all the eggs and beat up the peahen so that ever after she had a bit of a gimp.
After mating season and while the hens set and hatch their babies, the males lose all their tail feathers so we have had a most profligate supply of these glorious feathers.
On years when we could find the chicks we would put them with their mom in the chicken coop where they stayed more than a month beyond fledging until they were large enough and wily enough to evade predators and survive the long walks into the fields with the peahen. One peahen and one peacock however formed a very strong bond and last summer he–we indiscriminately call all our males Aroop Gupta, a name you will recognize if you are a Car Talk aficionado–stayed right by the chicken coop keeping a close eye on her and her brood.
Earlier this summer we suddenly realized we hadn’t seen any of last year’s four chicks (two were white-bodied, a new look for us) and then we didn’t see any hens. The Aroop Gupta aforementioned was spending most of his time sitting in the driveway, ever more bedraggled as his tail feathers dropped out, calling plaintively for her. We did glimpse her once on the other side of the road. Bob found several foxholes along the bank but we’ve seen no foxes. Last week we got a call from Colrain Center of a sighting but Bob couldn’t lure her to the box he had brought with him and a friend says he saw three peafowl near the Mohawk Trail.
Were the hens spooked? And by what? There is no traffic on our road now as the bridge has been closed by the high and mighty in the state highway department. Are predators–human or vulpine or both to blame? We don’t know but we are sad.
We still have our peacocks. They roost on our barn and shed roofs here or in the trees (as did the peahens when they were not sitting on eggs or tending their newly-hatched young.) The peacocks will continue–I hope!–to entertain us with their flights of brilliance, their Blue Angel displays of male arrogance. I can only hope that in time Aroop’s loneliness will lessen and he regains his good spirits to cavort with his cousins and brothers again.
