I am might be thinking of getting some how are they kept I seen that they can be kept to just wander I have heard they need to be kept in a aviary what is it? I also heard they wander off find mates and come back but I live in the UK the nearest peafowls are the ones miles away on a farm. I also heard they are great guard animals are they vicious? Or is just that their feather scare animals and people? I have seen them fly real high so does clipping even work if not and they do just wander around the town will they just go come back for food or what.
If you want to free-range peafowl it is best to start with young chicks or to even hatch your own. Everyone has their own way of training young peafowl to free-range, but the general consensus is that it is best to start with peachicks and then once they are fully grown you can let them out to free-range permanently. You may be able to train them to come into the aviary at night to sleep, but that can be hard to get them to do.
Free-range peafowl love sleeping in tall trees at night so they will look around for a good tree to sleep in. If the tall tree just happens to be on the edge of your property, when they fly down in the morning they may fly down onto the wrong side and sometimes that will mean corralling them back over to your yard.
If you keep them in an aviary it should be around 100 sq ft. (9.2903 sq meters) per peafowl.
Free-range peafowl can wander off randomly, and I don't think it is always just to find a mate. They are very curious birds. They may wander off and lose track of where home is. Sometimes they show up the next day, sometimes they show up after a few years, or sometimes they never come back. They can cover a lot of distance and can show up miles away from home.
They might make noise if someone pulls up into your yard, but that is about it. A local breeder told me a story about a bunch of her peacocks chasing away a stray pit bull that was tormenting her birds. She said they ran the dog off by chasing and flying at him. She also told me that her peacocks saved one of her chickens from a hawk attack. I wouldn't count on them defending your property or other pets though. I think the best animal for that will always be a dog. As for being vicious, zoos will tell you that peafowl can be aggressive and to stay a safe distance away from their birds, but I believe that zoos might have aggressive peafowl due to mean kids and/or adults that like to chase the peacocks trying to pull out a train feather. The birds then may feel threatened by people and feel like they must defend themselves when a person gets too close. Sometimes closely hand raised peacocks can grow up to be aggressive. I think that it all depends on the personality of the bird if they will grow up to be aggressive. I do know that having an aggressive rooster is far more common than having an aggressive peacock.
Clipping a free-range peafowl's wings is not a very good idea because then it can be hard for them to escape predators. If some zoos really do clip their peafowl's wings, then that sounds like a very bad idea. Peafowl are curious and they can and will go into the exhibit of a predator at the zoo. Without their ability to fly this is very bad for the peafowl - that and they need to get up high at night to be safe from predators which will be hard to do if they can't fly into a tree. The last time I went to the zoo there was a white peacock in the black bear exhibit. I watched worriedly as he walked around in the bear pit and even lay down in the shade! The bears were not even watching him so I suppose they know they can't catch him.
When you free-range peafowl they may come back for food, but nothing is guaranteed. A neighbor could start feeding them without you knowing and they may start hanging out at the neighbor's instead. Down the street someone might have a fruit or nut tree that is ripe and your birds could leave for a week or more to enjoy the bounty like what happened to one lady I spoke to. Her peafowl would leave to go eat pecans that were chopped up when someone down the road mowed their lawn.
It is hard to say what they will do until you actually start free-ranging them. In my opinion the best thing to do is not free-range all of them at once so that if something happens to the free-range birds, you will still have some in an aviary. It is horrible to have peafowl one day and have them all gone the next. I had my first pair run away around this time of year back in 2009. Now I keep all of them in an aviary. Eventually I would like to free-range again, but currently I do not think my situation is good for free-ranging.
