Hanging pen netting is no fun when your short......

[Chiaro]

I understand. There are many times, especially when I am out feeding and watering waterfowl, plus the llamas, alpacas and mini horses in a snowstorm, (or worse, repairing netting with freezing fingers), that I think I must be crazy to put myself through all of this. Then I look at all my beautiful geese, Sebastopols, my funny ducks and all the rest and they make me happy, so I keep on going. Life would be so much simpler without the critters but how BORING! and so very dull.

You may have a better time of it with the stronger netting, it may save you some headaches.

 

[Chiaro]

BTW, Green Peafowl sound awesome, if you get some post photos.

 

[MinxFox]

I understand. There are many times, especially when I am out feeding and watering waterfowl, plus the llamas, alpacas and mini horses in a snowstorm, (or worse, repairing netting with freezing fingers), that I think I must be crazy to put myself through all of this. Then I look at all my beautiful geese, Sebastopols, my funny ducks and all the rest and they make me happy, so I keep on going. Life would be so much simpler without the critters but how BORING! and so very dull.

You may have a better time of it with the stronger netting, it may save you some headaches.

Haha same here. I like to complain about working on the pen, but really I have nothing else to do with my free time. Might as well do something productive. I agree it would be so boring without any animal. I just can't see not being able to have the peafowl and at least one dog. Today I was working on the netting a little bit and fixing a roost. I need to go get some treated lumber to make a new roost, but for now the one I have will be okay (it is rotting at the bottom so I had to re-dig the hole and it is shorter now).

The green peafowl are really beautiful. The person I will probably end up buying green peafowl from is an hour away and he is a large peafowl breeder so it can be hard getting into contact with him since he is always busy shipping birds off somewhere and such. Luckily he holds a farm day open to the public each year so last year was my first year going to that. I got to see all 3 subspecies of green peafowl in person for the first time, and really wanted to buy a pair of the green peachicks he had that day, but I didn't have room for them.
Here is my favorite green peafowl he has. This one is a Pavo Muticus Muticus (similar to a Java) and most of the greens were really flighty and would run to the other end of the pen, but this pretty boy walked right up to greet us. I would love to have offspring from him, yet because he is an imported bird chicks from him would be very expensive. I will probably just go with the cheaper green peafowl just incase until I finally want to make the leap for getting a more expensive bird.




Hopefully by the time this year's farm day comes I will have a new pen ready for green peafowl. Also hopefully there will be birds available. Green peafowl are said to be harder to breed so some years you might not get any chicks from them. If that happens I will really be kicking myself for not being ready for them last year.

 

[Chiaro]

WOW! he's incredible! how great would it be to have a bird like that walking around your yard? I hope you can get some. If not then maybe some eggs? do you have a hen who goes broody, or can you get a broody chicken or duck?

 

[MinxFox]

Unfortunately you can't free range green peafowl. They are too easily spooked and they fly very well so they could fly off and never come back really easily, plus since they are endangered you don't really want to free-range them. Some people let theirs out for a little bit and I have heard of people free-ranging them, but it is harder to free range them and the males can be very territorial to other males. One person who used to free-range them said they were like ninjas fighting in the trees.

What I like about them is the peahen looks almost exactly like the male. She has just about the same color brilliance but of course lacks the pretty eye feathers.
This is a peahen:

Most of the photos I got were a little blurry. The birds were very jumpy so I suspect if I ever got some I would have to work with them to get them calmed down around people.
I did get lucky this year and one person on BYC knew how much I really wanted green peafowl so he sent me two green peafowl eggs from a pair of greens he has. He explained that he wasn't hatching this year and was literally throwing out eggs so he sent me some. One egg got a detached air cell in shipping and the other maybe developed for a week and then quit, but I thought it was still good so I incubated it until it went really bad. I don't have any chickens to use for eggs, but I do have 2 incubators that I have hatched peafowl eggs out of. The hard part about peafowl eggs is that they don't do so well in shipping. I have never been able to hatch shipped peafowl eggs, but I can hatch my own peafowl's eggs. It was really sad though because when I contacted the guy telling him that neither of the eggs worked out, he said just the other day he threw out some green eggs and wished he would have remembered me! Those must have been the last eggs he got from the pair this year. I did contact the breeder who owns the green peafowl that the photos are of, but he strictly only sells their chicks when they are around 6 months old or so. I thought that since I met him and expressed how badly I want green peafowl he could make an exception, but he has stayed very firm on prices and no eggs or very small chicks. I would love to hatch some though.

 

[Chiaro]

Man, the females are so beautiful, what a lovely bird. I imagine that a wing could be clipped to prevent flying but they would still have to be in a fenced yard or even a stray dog could kill them. My flighted ducks, 5 female Calls and 2 female Mallards, live in the back yard under the netting so they get to use their wings. I have some happy, little "accidents" from 2 years ago when a Runner drake and a Call hen managed to make babies. There are 6 little girls and they did get their Mom's power of flight but their Dad's (Runner) more dominant nature so they cannot live with the Calls, they have to live with the Runners where they do quite well. Because they are flighted, once a year, after the molt is finished, I have to clip a wing on each of them or they will catch an updraft and be 30 feet in the air in no time. If they would fly back INto the yard it would be great but they don't, they walk up to the fence and stand there and quack until I walk all the way around and herd them back in through the gate.So they get a clipped wing, the dirtbags. lol

 

[Chiaro]

All shipped eggs are very difficult to hatch, the shipping process really can mess them up. I know that if I want to hatch a shipped goose egg I need to order at least 10 so that maybe 1 or 2 will hatch.

 

[MinxFox]

Man, the females are so beautiful, what a lovely bird. I imagine that a wing could be clipped to prevent flying but they would still have to be in a fenced yard or even a stray dog could kill them. My flighted ducks, 5 female Calls and 2 female Mallards, live in the back yard under the netting so they get to use their wings. I have some happy, little "accidents" from 2 years ago when a Runner drake and a Call hen managed to make babies. There are 6 little girls and they did get their Mom's power of flight but their Dad's (Runner) more dominant nature so they cannot live with the Calls, they have to live with the Runners where they do quite well. Because they are flighted, once a year, after the molt is finished, I have to clip a wing on each of them or they will catch an updraft and be 30 feet in the air in no time. If they would fly back INto the yard it would be great but they don't, they walk up to the fence and stand there and quack until I walk all the way around and herd them back in through the gate.So they get a clipped wing, the dirtbags. lol

Yeah you can't clip peafowl wings. Even with both wings clipped they can easily jump a fence. They are great at jumping and then of course once they jump a fence you have to worry about predators getting them. No one really recommends clipping peafowl wings because of this. I think if people have one they are keeping in the house temporarily like if it is sick, they will clip the wings to prevent it from flying into things. I know a guy who has lots of ducks and they will fly off into the woods to a creek and swim around then come flying back in. I think his are mallards. They spook really easily so when I visit I try to stay away from their little pond area because if I get close they take off flying making a lot of noise. Oops!

Shipped eggs confuse me because some people can get all shipped eggs or mostly all to hatch for them, but I have no such luck. In total I think I have tried hatching 8 shipped eggs, so I haven't had many chances. 6 from one person that sent me some a few years ago and 2 from that guy who sent me the green peafowl eggs (Doug). Some people spend a lot of money trying to get started with peafowl by buying hatching eggs. Us peafowl folks usually recommend to people to not get started with hatching eggs since they are hard to hatch, you don't know what genders you will have, peachicks can be fragile for the first 3 months, etc. The eggs that have been shipped to me were all free so at least I didn't lose any money but I did lose sanity once I found all eggs to be bad. They were all shipped quickly and packaged extremely well but I guess the trip was just too much on the eggs.

 

[Chiaro]

I had a goose who was that springy, even with both wings clipped she popped over a 4 ft. fence.

Peafowl are very cool birds.

 

[MinxFox]

Yes they are fun birds to raise.