Austin Zoo poultry- peafowl and chickens

Fishkeeper

Crowing
Oct 30, 2017
2,345
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Central Texas
The Austin Zoo is a rescue zoo near us. They have tigers, lions, black bears, pumas, lemurs, large tortoises, a lot of different parrots, some miscellaneous reptiles, basically everything that people get as pets and then can't care for or have confiscated. It's kind of a small zoo, but all the animals are healthy and happy and have lots of toys. They also have some fowl freeranging around part of the zoo- a few guineas, a few chickens and roosters, and some peafowl. The fowl can't get into the big cat enclosures (tall fences) and evidently have the sense not to go into occupied pens with anything more dangerous than a lazy old pig or a porcupine. They mostly hang around the picnic area, but today a lot of them were in a black bear pen that was unoccupied due to the bear being isolated for medical treatment. I think they were taking advantage of all the un-scratched dirt.
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Big impressive male being big and impressive. He was loud, too, and rattled his tail a couple of times.

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Leucistic gal, maybe? She seemed unimpressed.

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These two ladies were outside a porcupine pen.

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Is this an odd female or a juvenile male? The staff said that, although they feed any eggs they can find to the bears, every now and then a peahen manages to hide an egg and raise a chick.

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Chickens in the bear pen.

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Beautiful Polish-style roosters who were unfortunately too shy to photograph well. They got along with each other really well from the looks of them. Mostly just crowed at the peacocks yelling.

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Not sure what this guy is, but he's pretty. There was also a light brahma rooster (or something very similar) who vanished under a bush to avoid a small child.

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Nice big boy in an excellent pose.

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Wild Texas spiny lizards.

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A staff member handed me a few porcupine quills from inside the enclosure (she was in there giving them water), and our cat spent a minute straight sniffing this one very intently.
 
Never realized how big their quills are.

At the zoo out here, the Guineas and Peafowl free range, and I've seen both with young'un's last year. So they must allow some of them to hatch eggs.

They also had a walk-in area with Emus and just a 12" high fence keeping them from the public. I asked the docent if they went over the fence. She said they prefer to keep their distance from people so have never tried.
 

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