Spot the peacock!

January 3, 2019 • 8:30 am

This is for beginners and those new to this site. At the Waimea Valley yesterday, I was walking beneath the trees and heard a scream from above. A male peacock had flown up into the branches.

Can you spot him? This is rated “dead easy,” but I’d never seen a peacock in a tree before:

This is so easy that I won’t give a reveal, but do notice that despite his gaudy colors, the male is pretty cryptic up there.

18 thoughts on “Spot the peacock!”

  2. It does blend in rather well.

    I didn’t know that Guinea Fowl roosted in trees until my wife and I went for a stroll through the grounds of a hotel in Wales when we stayed there for xmas… lots of tiny, beady eyes suddenly catching the light is somewhat disconcerting.

  3. My old bf’s family friends had ~35 peacocks ( as well as various other exotic fowl) loose in their backyard near Cape Canaveral, Florida. The peacocks would mainly hang out in a huge tree and make an ungawdly cat-like yowling racket. Apparently the town’s mayor once found a bunch of them marching down the middle of the main drag and asked the owner to please call them home.

  4. Oh yeah, they are pretty good flyers, taking into account the massive display piece :D. I’ve seen a couple of them perching in trees, and sometimes they fly in and out of a zoo close to where I live in.

  5. Looking for a pea hen.
    I would expect you are seeing a lot of feral chickens out there too, especially in the parks and other more laid back areas.

  8. The “trick” is that one can only see the actual tail’s feathers – male peacocks shed their glorious feathers annually. So, in the photo, one can see the tail of the peacock minus its long colourful feathers. 🙂

  9. In Northern Italy, the peacocks seems to be white or albino, I presume that they were specially bred and domesticated since they were associated with show gardens of the well-off. These days they seem to have more to do with tourism.

    Isola Bella is one of the small islands on Lago Maggiore near the Swiss border and everyone remembers the white peacocks (Pavoni) there.
    They don’t camouflage too well!

  10. They have a lot of peacocks at the Los Angeles County Arboretum, one of my favorite local places to go. It’s a good place to observer peacock behavior. They are often in the low branches of trees, just out of reach by humans. They aren’t good fliers but do glide down from their perches a considerable distance. I’ve also noticed the females engaging in communal babysitting. One will be in charge of, say, 20 chicks for an hour before handing them off to another female. At least that was what I saw — not a scientific study.

    1. A hefty wood pigeon taking off from just beside you has the same effect.

      There you are, padding quietly along a hillside track in the ‘bush’ (vegetation maybe ten feet tall), and usually a thumping great wood pigeon sitting about your head level a few feet away on the downhill side of the track doesn’t notice you (or you it) till you’ve just passed it. At which point it takes off with a massive and quite un-bird-like ‘whut whut whut’ like a helicopter rotor six feet from your head. Startles the bejesus out of me.

      cr

      1. Great description–I can totally relate to that. 😀

        Ring-necked Pheasants are also good for a major start…

  12. Driving on the back roads in New Zealand I occasionally come across peacocks. I’ve also come across turkeys (not a native bird here), fleets of parakeets (escaped Australian imports), and a sulphur crested cockatoo. Quite aside from the usual hawks, ducks, pukeko and mynah birds.

    It adds a strand of interest to the drive.

    cr

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