Peacock video

[destinduck]

Very cool videos. Thanks for sharing. Welcome to BYC! So great how friendly they are.

 

[MinxFox]

They are our favorite animals (besides our parrot). When you hatch them and then raise them in the house interacting with them everyday they become just like puppys. We call them feathered Monkey-puppies because they act like puppies and they are as mischevious as monkeys. We have a hard time working around here. When the wife is trying to water all her plants (we have a commercial nursery) they will grab the hose and try to pull it out of her hands.

When I was putting a new roof on the garage they were up there "helping" constantly. They steal tools especially the drill because they get excited about the noise it makes.
When we have a big project that requires lots of nails, screws and small parts we have to lock them up.

The four you see in the training video were the strangest babies ever. I got them at the auction and they were only a couple days old. When you have several babies they normally will go to sleep content with each other.
Not these guys. They were super needy from day one. They all had to be held especially when it was time for bed. I would warp them all up in a towel and hold them until they were asleep and then put the whole bundle into their cage.
Still every day until they were about two months old they got played with, cuddle and put to bed. Then they moved outside into a huge pen with all the pheasants. But evry day for several hours they got to come out and play.

Since they had been raised crawling in and under our hair for socialization we WERE the parent and they would do just about anything for us.
Flying was lots of fun from the beginning. We would sit in the yard and they would from from one of us to the other just for kicks.

They loved that dog too. They used to land on him and try to ride..They weren't very good jockeys.

Unfortunately as they got older it wasn't fun to do all the tricks any more but jumping up and getting a worm out of my mouth was still something to do ..occassionally.

That is so cool! So yours just free range mainly? I have been wanting to free range some peafowl, my first pair I free ranged but it didn't work out because I got adults...Anyways since then I have been so attached to the peafowl that it is hard picking who to chance it with and let out. We are mainly afraid that if we let out Peep whenever we leave in the car we would be afraid he would follow us. He is really attached to me and paces the pen when I leave and calls for me a few times until he realises I am not comming back until tomorrow. This year I had a pencil in my hand and was reaching down to mark the date on a new peafowl egg and Peep took the pencil from my hand and ran around with it in his mouth as if it was a game of keep away! It was really funny! It is really different having a hand raised one vs. the ones that you can only hand feed and that is it. As a small chick we kept him inside a baby pen with a towel over the top so he couldn't fly out. I always liked watching Peep test out his flying in the backyard. Sometimes he would fly onto the roof of the house and I would have to call and call to him until finally he would fly down.

He is a silly bird.

 

[FoulFowl]

Face it PEEP is your child. When you have ONE that is like that you are stuck. Let him run while you are there and pen him up when you are gone.

We have had the single hand-raised too and they just can't deal with the 'aloneness' they aren't a peacock. They are a people. They get lonely.

When we first started out we had a single male. We got him as an adult. After being kept in the barn for three months we let him out and he would roam all day and go to bed at night.

Our barn is different than most barns. It's over 2500 square feet. It's about 15 feet high and the etire western side is covered by a giant maple so it is always cool in the summer and warm in the winter.
It has one section inside that is about 900 square feet that has walls on three side.
The outer section is completely open with only posts holding the roof up so there is always sunlight, shade and air.
Of course the open section is completely covered with 1 inch chicken wire that has 12 inches of wire buried in the ground to keep diggers out.

Okay that's the barn. But he was lonely. He would call and call but there were no peacocks around. Then he started hearing the kids hollering and carrying on down the road and across the street and he would go over there and visit.

He finally started staying home when we got the first four babies.. He had friends..

Ours are only free-range some of the time. We are completely fenced and when the front gate is closed they can run. But we have a commercial nursery so several months out of the year we are open until 6PM with the gate open. During that time they have to stay in until 6.

 

[MinxFox]

Ah I see. I am into gardening a little and am always trying out new plants to put in the aviary with them that they won't eat. Clumping bamboo works really well for them.

The only problem about free-ranging Peep is that I keep all my peafowl at my grandma's who is two miles from our house. I go over there every day at around 3:00 to feed the peafowl and stay for an hour or more with them. Other then that I am not there so Peep wouldn't really get to free-range. I wish I lived where I keep my peafowl but I am just happy to have peafowl!
Some people say that if you hand raise a peacock he might turn agressive when he gets older. Have you seen any agression in your males?

 

[FoulFowl]

Ah the myth of the agressive peacock. Peacocks are DEFENSIVE not OFFENSIVE. They protect. They don't attack. That's a myth spread by the media and continued on.

Most people just don't realize that their supposed friendly gestures and their "cute" kids are neither friendly or cute. They let their kids rush around darting at anything and everything and to the mellow peacock ..THAT is an attack.

The strange thing is though...more kids act sensible than do the adults. Adults don't practice the same kind of behavior they expect from their kids and they just GRAB.

Also more adults are afraid of peacocks (and most other birds) beause of myths, wives tales and goofy phobias they have developed so if a nice friendly peacock wants to inspect them it becomes and attack or they act so stupid the peacock thinks he is getting attacked.

People just misinterpret what they are seeing because they have been told things that are not true.
Peacocks are extremely inquisitive. They want to inspect, taste and even steal anything shiny or even just different and that scares people.

The thing that really scares them is peacocks favorite nibble item...fingers and toes.

This video shows what a lot of people would consider an attack

The closest thing I see to aggression around here is Gray Girl (our oldest female) nipping all the other peacocks to keep them away from the peanuts and sunflower seeds.
Then when she is done she will lay on them so nobody else can have any.. All the peacocks are afraid of her when there are nuts involved.

People also talk about how combative the males are with each other but then I see how they have them penned with tall wooden walls between them. It's the unnatural environment that makes the peacocks alter their natural behavior. Prison causes violence.

We had to keep our pheasants in a pen but at one time the peacocks spent time in there. Golden Boy, one of our male golden pheasants, and Casper our white male were good friends but when Casper was no longer confined they would sit on opposite sides of the fence pecking at each other for hours. I think Golden Boy was envious but he was the aggressor.

People also say that the males will kill the babies but around here they help take care of the babies. One year when I turned some incubated chickens out to the barn Casper decided that the were HIS babies and he would stand in the middle of them while they ate, keeping everybody else away.

I can go on and on. I live among the peacocks and I can tell you about behavior that most people never notice.

So ask away

 

[AugeredIn]

Ah the myth of the agressive peacock. Peacocks are DEFENSIVE not OFFENSIVE. They protect. They don't attack. That's a myth spread by the media and continued on.

I would generally agree with you that what we consider to be aggressive behavior is the result of defensive actions on their part. However, when they are penned for breeding and they come after you when you enter they pens, their defensive action is an aggressive behavior to us. There is no way to prevent the action if you have to enter the pen. Hand raised peacocks that have been penned or breeding will many times be aggressively defensive when you get in their territory.

 

[FoulFowl]

All animals protect their territory. When the birds are penned that is their territory and their actions are not aggressive. You are the aggressor. They are the protector.
Defensive is the exact opposite of aggressive.

 

[MinxFox]

Yeah before I got peafowl when I went to a rescue center that had some peafowl that took up residence on their grounds I got anoyed because the keepers there warned me when I was taking photos of the peacocks that they were dangerous and might attack me! I didn't really believe them especially because these peafowl were a bit spooky.

So the only thing you really have to worry about is a peacock defending his territory. So do they feel the need to defend their territory when the peahens have eggs and/or are on a nest or will they just defend their territory all breeding season? I know the males do get defensive with their display area and scare other males away from their display spot.

 

[FoulFowl]

Good keepers always say something like that. It is to protect the peacocks. The odds are you are never going to get smacked by a peacock unles you have them cornered and even then they would rather try to slip past you. Of course if a little kid gets one cornered the peacock knows it's big enough to knock the kid out of the way so it can run.

The only time a peacock actually has 'territory' is when it is penned. Just being penned means they know they can't get away so their only recourse is whatever is necessary to make the intruder go away. They aren't territorial birds. I've never had any problem introducing new adult birds to the flock.
Their primary method of defense is making themselves big, puffing out their neck feathers, raising their tail and lunging forward to frighten

Now a female with babies will kick the crap out of you. They definitely will not get defensive about their nest. They will attract as much attention as possible to distract you from the nest and the male most likely won't even know where the nest is. The female doesn't want ANYBODY to know were it is.
Of course this nesting behavior only applies to free-range peacocks

 

[FoulFowl]

Breaking news. Found two peacock nests today in one of the old Pheasant boxes. There were four boxes to choose from (all in a row)but both nests are in one box... great choice good cover.