please post some pics of your peacocks

I dont have any
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but I would love to see some picts too
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Current birds:
Ice my blackshoulder peahen
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Damsel my Pied Peahen
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Alto my India blue peacock
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Peachicks: four whites, 2 dark pieds, one pied.
Little white
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Dark pied and pied female chicks
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Peep
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Peep when he was younger:
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Three whites (when they were younger)
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Birds that have passed on:
Pip my India blue peahen
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Dragon my pied peacock
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Runaway bird:
Fire my India blue peacock
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the Peacock Tree is where most of the peafowl sleep at night until it gets too cold. Then they migrate into the barns.

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Peacock Barn

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Most of the resident flock moves into the egg barn which is where all the chickens, geese, turkeys, guineafowl and muscovies spend the winter. This young Indian Blue male is defending his mum and girlfriend from Wuzzle the resident mouser of the feed barn who occasionally follows me into the egg barn.


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Egg Barn with Rapanui Fowl out front

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Egg Barn with Greenhouse Barn #2


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Sometimes one of the cold-hardy birds ends up in Greenhouse Barn 2. Zephyr for example- as he had an injured wing from fighting with a fox one fall.

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Zephyr's father was a White Emerald from Lewis Eckard and his mother was a Sharmapa peahen (wild hybrid from Bhutan)

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One early spring (it seems like every other year now) we had hurricane force winds tear apart the farm. As we are atop a mountain that's not to be unexpected. Unfortunately, a great deal of the glass on one of the Green House Barns shattered under a tree. Subtropical species like our Cardamom Peafowl female escaped. We assumed we would never see her again. It was heart breaking. This is not a greenhouse barn this is all that remains of one of the camel tents.

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Zephyr rarely leaves his perch over Frog Creek even on frigid days.
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I was out of the country most of spring and came back to Vermont mid-June or so. I was heading down to the main barn and noticed Lady Cardamom near the driveway!
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I went chasing after her with my iphone taking photos but she spooked and rand down into the the sheep paddock!



I went to go find her but she had vanished again. But she vanished into a pasture below Frog Creek- a pasture under Zephyr's constant surveillance. I wondered if perhaps he might know where she was as he had spent a whole winter with her in the barn a years earlier and the two were smitten. So, I went looking for Zephyr, who is a hell of a lot easier to see in the distance, especially in the quince grove and birches.

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Sure enough I found him alright. His daily trajectory-was all nest defense- with nuchal hood inflated like a cobra- stiff march along the llama trails- with the occasional zig zag erratic deportment display. I could not find the nest but I knew it were somewhere in the bog marsh- hidden in the rushes in a deep depression.

I waited for days and worried about his being a beacon for any fox or bobcat or lynx or fisher cat- and wishing I had gone down and trapped this priceless hen.
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But then one day writing in the Sugar Shack i saw Zephyr make one of erratic deportment displays off to my left - putting him in the trajectory of an errant llama.
There I saw Lady Cardamom with a tiny chick. You can just barely see the bog marsh ( to the left) where she hid that little critter for the first several days.
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I didn't see them for a few more days and one day i went out to check out what was going on down at the horse barns and guess what I saw but Zephyr, Lady Cardamom and their little chick Haste -who is so named because I could never seem to get him into camera. He would see me coming and just vanish.
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Where's Haste? Everytime I saw her and not him my heart would sink but then I'd just need to look for Zephyr.
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Zephyr, Lady Cardamom and Haste hunting for Peepers (tree frogs) in the frog pond at the head of Frog Creek

Now to be abundantly clear, I don't condone hybridizing peafowl. This happened on accident. I would have been unhappy about it but it ended up being highly informative. In Vermont, we have two flocks of peafowl on the one property and a single flock (mostly bachelors) at the other. One of the two flocks at the one spread is a pure Indian group with a few black shoulders. They really don't interact that much with the other group which is a composite of Sharmapa peafowl ( a gift from the Sharmapa meditation retreat- the peafowl are hybrids from 8'000+' elevation Buddhist temples in Bhutan and Sikkim) and hybrids I've purchased over the years that are mirror phenotypes of the Sharmapa birds- and then of course Haste and his progeny. -Hybrid to Hybrid I'm just fine with but please don't have the impression that I condone crossing green peafowl to produce hybrids.

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Lady Cardamom and her son Haste later that autumn



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Zephyr and the errant herd.

Lady Cardamom was already in an arranged marriage with Lord Edua who lived in Jungleworld at the Bronx Zoo. Of course she had not yet met her soon to be husband as it had taken me four years to get her into the USA. I wanted her to be near me in Vermont so I could study her rather than hours away at the facilities in Westchester where I keep other forms of Green Peafowl. I had had her in my greenhouse barn with firebacks for the year and a half that it took to get her on the fast track into the Bronx Zoo. Then there was the storm - she escaped- we told the zoo she was deceased- then she showed back up- with a mongrel chick nonetheless- and a lovely summer passed- and finally it was time to part with her. I had her and Haste trapped up in one of the barns and prepared her for being shipped into the zoo quarantine. But then some brouhaha went down at the zoo- as we were off their tight schedule - there was no room in the zoo quarantine and this news was followed by some political nonsense with the Mammal Department taking control over the Jungleworld exhibit and Edua was a pain- literally in the behind. Lady Cardamom wasn't going to go live in Jungleworld after all. So she spent another winter in Vermont. Greenhouse Barn #2 was in no shape for birds and the other Greenhouse Barns are dedicated to small delicate creatures like peacock pheasants and fragile plants like orchids- no place for a peafowl. I persuaded my dear friend Norman Johnson of Ithaca New York to come take her away. He would pair her with a bird related to Edua. Haste stayed behind, heartbroken but he and Zephyr were inseparable.

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A few years passed and Haste sired some chicks with a hen named Jasmine, a Sharmapa peahen.

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Later that year in early spring before the Vermont winter is anywhere near over, Haste started being a real jerk and wouldn't let any of the male peafowl perch in the barn- not even Zephyr. March is the coldest month in Vermont and there were peafowl freezing in the trees all over the place. So I locked him out of the main barn. Thinking that might cool him off- like he was in Tibet but he was evil as soon as spring broke so I sent him to live on another old estate of some extended family in Virginia



Subsequently, the flock coalesced again and Haste's son Malachite the first paired with a Purple Spaulding hen I got from Manny. She produced two daughters. I paired them with a really cool male received from Ken Piercy. Malachite the first proved to be a jerk too so he was eventually shipped off to an old farm estate in Manchester Vermont. We didn't have anymore new peafowl at Taft Hill for a long time. That closed flock just self-perpetuated. My other farm in Vermont-has a different flock of peafowl- those that have proved irksome to our neighbors across the valley at the Windham Hill Inn whose guests like to sleep in late. Any peafowl that shriek like Indian Peafowl are consigned and banished to the Hovel Farm (near Marlboro College) where everyone is used to peacock noises.




The last few years I discovered Opal Spauldings from some feathers Sid of Texas Peafowl sent me so I bought some of them from Ithaca. We have three or four of them.
I know they aren't show stoppers but I think they're perfect.

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Smoky

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Meanwhile, the closed flock descendants of the original Sharmapa flock from Marlboro College, the Purple Spaulding hen, Lady Cardamom, Zephyr- and the Johnson Boys, they just do their thing. They are our resident flock.
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Malachite III and Smoky
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Tektite III
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Tektite II and Zephyr chowing on "superfood".

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Down at the Cabbage Hill Farm Foundation Headquarters (in Westchester County NY), Shetland Ducks and juvenile Black-Winged Peafowl from the Sharmapa lineage form another feral colony.


* None of the photos have been retouched or screwed with in any way whatsoever.
 
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Mahonri that peacock is soooo pretty...boy to have that tail he must be bit older.
here is Mr Giggles he is only 4 years old and just got his tail
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baught him at a swap for $25 3 years ago. he has to stay in the coop for now cause we dont have a hen yet so he bonded with our guinea hen. couple months ago he ran away for 3 weeks....ya we made sure he couldnt escape again
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he is very shy with fanning his tail he only does it super early in the morning to the guinea
 

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