Why Peacocks?

by Sean Flynn

  There is always the potential when dabbling with birds—and this no one tells you beforehand—of becoming enchanted, and it is impossible to understand this until it happens. Until, for example, two plump hens sprint toward the sound of your voice and Comet hops on your shoulder and Snowball leaps for blueberries and Mr. Pickle twirls so closely to you that his ruffling feathers brush across your face and Ethel tilts her head and softly trills and waits for another piece of tomato. It is utterly unexpected, too, because the experience is not at all like that of other pets. Tater is my constant companion, unshakably loyal, tirelessly available. Yet a dog withholds nothing, so there are no secrets. Birds, if we aren’t paying attention, are all secrets, so alien from us that it hardly seems worth the effort to decode them.

  But then there is, sometimes for some people, a starburst of insight, not of understanding but of realizing there is something to be understood. One bird will reveal one tiny secret—I recognize you, perhaps most often—and your perception of the natural world shifts. Those secrets become mysteries, which are different because mysteries are an invitation to explore, and each one reveals another and then those birds have personalities and intelligence and foibles and charms and souls and it all sounds ridiculous but it’s true.

  That’s basically what happened to Valerie.

  The finches led to parrotlets, which, as the name suggests, are itty-bitty parrots. Then she came across a plea on Craigslist from a woman who was moving and had to find a home for two ducks, two chicken hens, and a black Australorp rooster. Help, the ad said. I need someone who will love them and not eat them.

  “Graham,” Valerie told her son, “we need these.”

  Peacocks came next, also from a Craigslist ad, then more ducks, more chickens. She bought some, but most were rescues in one way or another—hens that had stopped laying, the rooster the 4-H kid was supposed to cull from his flock but didn’t have the heart to kill, wounded ducks picked up by the ASPCA. She bartered her nursing skills for veterinary care from Burkett, which she was doing the day I met her, and she’d set up a kind of avian ICU in her three-season porch where she can administer subcutaneous fluids and tube-feed and such.

  The white duck with the plain head in the yard was a Pekin named Daisy. She was the matriarch of that five-bird variety pack Valerie found on Craigslist, and she got horribly sick. Graham picked up on it. She’d swallowed a piece of wire. It had to be cut out, but it was deep in the thicket of her digestive tract, “and once you start opening up runs of bowel,” Valerie said, “she’s already gone.” Burkett used X-rays from multiple angles to triangulate where to cut. Though he missed by only an eighth of an inch, the surgery took hours. When Daisy was sewn up and the anesthesia began to fade, “she stood up like an Indian runner duck and plastered herself to me.”

  (That analogy is more endearing once you understand that Indian runners hold themselves erect, like penguins, and instead of waddling, they, well, run. But it’s pretty charming in any case simply for involving a duck.)

  Valerie was explaining her fondness for the birds when she told me that story, telling me how they are always there, affectionate in their way, appreciative, never arguing or complaining, and she started to cry when she got to Daisy. She caught herself, laughed maniacally, and said, “I spent six thousand dollars to save a fucking duck.”

  I did not consider that outlandish.

  On that Sunday in March, though, the boys and I were only picking up a Spalding hen. We’d brought a cat carrier with us, the one we used to take Okra to the vet. I’d learned my lesson about feed bags.

  Valerie walked us down to the pen, pointed out our hen. She was, for a girl peacock, striking, as if she’d been run through a filter, the color saturation and contrast ratcheted up. Instead of pond-water brown, her back was a rich chocolate, the kind Whole Foods stocks in the checkout line. The green in her neck, which was longer and narrower than Ethel’s, was closer to emerald than grass, and there was blue in there, too, just a shade duller and darker than Mr. Pickle’s breast. A lighter blue, the color of an April sky, appeared to have been dusted below and behind each eye, and a slash of brown curled across the top of each, like drawn-on eyebrows. Her crest was noticeably taller and tighter. She was a glamorous version of Ethel, Ginger to her Mary Ann.

  Valerie went in and got her, calmed her down, slipped her into the crate. “She’ll be good with Carl,” Valerie said. “What are you going to call her?”

  “Girl Carl!” Emmett chirped.

  “GC?” Valerie offered. “Abbreviate it?”

  We settled on Carlotta once we got her home, though Louise continued to refer to her as “Carl’s concubine.” Later, we realized we should have named her Eudora in honor of the late Mrs. Keith Spalding of California—which also would have created the buddy-comedy title of Louise’s dreams, “Ethel & Eudora”—but Carlotta already had stuck. As with children, there are no second chances on naming a bird.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The noise started in the middle of April, the beginning of mating season. Mr. Pickle, a rising two-note burst, E above middle C, up to G, a quick slur down to F-sharp. He repeated it twice, which I could hear from inside the house. It was not a plaintive cry, desperate and whiny, but assertive, a robust announcement: I am here. A moment later, he encored with a triplet of single notes in the same range, mow mow mow.

  There was an immediate sense of relief. That wasn’t so bad, I thought. He did not sound like a woman crying for help nor, I presumed, a dying child, which were all descriptions I’d read. He was not shrill. He made a luxurious and exotic noise, trembling with tropical steam and far-flung passion. It was a lithe and sultry sound, if one was determined to hear it as such.

  For months I had dreaded those noises. I had clicked enough YouTube links, heard enough of the cries through the tinny speakers of a laptop to fear them. Not for us so much as the people who lived around us. I didn’t want to start a bird war in the neighborhood, touch off another Palos Verdes. As near as I could discern, there was no city or county ordinance specifically outlawing peacocks, but in case one existed, I didn’t want neighbors’ complaints to draw attention to my flock. Ideally I would have considered all of this before impulsively bringing three birds home to satisfy a sudden, irrational, and most likely passing obsession. But it was too late. I was four birds in. I’d paid Burkett a small fortune and hoarded sand. More to the point, I liked them. Not all birds, necessarily, but these specific ones, Carl and Mr. Pickle and Ethel. I was still warming to Carlotta, but I assumed I’d grow fond of her, too.

  I asked my shrink friend once why I didn’t just euthanize Carl when he was sicker than Keith Richards. “Bonded empathy,” he said. “He’s your buddy.”

  “Meh,” I said. “I think I was just too chickenshit to put him out of his misery.”

  He shrugged. “That’s in Buddyville. Same thing.”

  It was all irrelevant, because none of the birds had yet to show the slightest inclination to leave. Sometimes I would test them, stand with the door open and wait for them to make a move. They always did, but only toward the cinder block from which treats were dispensed.

  But the matter of noise remained. For a long stretch of delusional hope, I thought perhaps I would be immune, that maybe captive peacocks were quieter, even silent. Or maybe it wasn’t so bad to begin with; peacock racket wouldn’t have been the only phenomenon exaggerated on the Internet. Maybe some people even enjoyed the whoops and hoots and yawps.

  That was, I briefly believed, entirely possible. On the first day of April, Uncle John, my friend with the net, sent me a posting from his neighborhood listserv. “Welcome the peacocks to Forest Hills!” it said across the top. A woman who lived near him explained that she had been on a meditation retreat in an old monastery near Rome. “A flock of peacocks roamed the grounds,” she wrote, “and they made the experience of staying there absolutely magical. The adult males are the most beautiful birds on the planet, parading around with their gorgeous tails. I
n the evening it was fascinating to watch the hens herd their chicks onto the high perches, where they snuggled under their mommies’ wings for the night.”

  All of that sounded about right. She was going to start her own flock and invited her neighbors to do so as well. Forest Hills is a historic neighborhood nearby, built around a long-ago-decommissioned golf course. So many places for birds to roam and mingle! This was a compatriot. This was also, I thought, a possible way out of my dilemma to eventually free-range my birds.

  “And the best part,” she wrote, “was waking in the morning to their soothing calls.”

  Okay, that was a little off. I’d never seen that adjective attached to a peacock, but I figured that she’d probably meditated in silence for so long that any ambient sound was soothing. I asked John for an introduction, which he graciously provided.

  I missed the link at the end of the message. If I’d clicked, I would have heard another of those shrieking clips, quite possibly the least soothing one on the Internet.

  All in all, a pretty good April Fools’ Day joke for a listserv.

  Had I’d become so earnest about my birds that I could no longer detect sarcasm? Yes, I had, and this only prepared me to be mortified by the coming mating season. My neighbors would be furious, and Louise would shake her head in quiet disappointment. The boys might complain, too, though they were more of a wild card. The chickens and the goats and Chief probably wouldn’t mind, but they didn’t get a vote.

  Then, one fine day, Mr. Pickle started calling and it wasn’t so bad. Not to my ear.

  He did it twice more before sundown and once after and maybe more in the middle of the night, but if he did, I slept through it. That was a good sign. Carl joined in the next day. They made low, whistling hoots and a midrange yow and a higher-toned ah ah ah ah. The noises were occasional in April, then regular by May, at which point they escalated quickly to frequent and, at times, incessant. The squeak of the screen door would set them off, as would a car rolling over the gravel or the beep of a delivery van backing up.

  None of it bothered me, but I accepted that my judgment was skewed. After Carl’s extended flirtation with death, the boys had again lost interest, and Louise had her own deadlines to contend with. The peacocks were no longer ours but mine. Which was fine because they were minimal effort, just keeping them fed and watered and, every other day, scooping up droppings as if cleaning a giant litter box, and they were pleasant, at times even delightful, company. But it did make me predisposed to minimize their less appealing characteristics, so I relied on Louise as a more realistic barometer. If she referred to “the peacocks,” that meant they’d been benign, and if she used a name, Carl or Ethel, there had been a pleasant interaction of some sort. “The birds” indicated mild annoyance, while “those birds” suggested a more agitated state. There were fine gradations from there. We hit “motherfuckers” only twice that summer.

  Yet no one complained. I expected a knock on the door from a city official or a peeved, sleepy-eyed stranger, but it never came. One passing dog-walker asked if we had peacocks because she recognized the noise, but she did not seem perturbed. I began to believe that the acoustics of the pen, with a metal roof and my double-safe fortress wire, redirected the sound toward the ground, maybe smothered it. But then Emmett reported that, no, he’d been on his bike two blocks away and heard them quite clearly.

  Then they stopped. Abruptly, as if one hot day in August they decided that their vocal cords were exhausted. Their feathers had begun falling out by that point, too, a correlation Pliny the Elder had noted almost two thousand years ago. After molting, he wrote, “the bird is abashed and moping, and seeks retired spots.” But that’s crediting Carl and Mr. Pickle with far too much self-awareness, as well as a nifty way of recasting as self-pity the vanity we humans habitually project onto a bird. They seemed only to realize, in a primal, cyclical way, that the ladies were done with them for the year, and there was no point in calling if no one was going to answer.

  * * *

  The pen for the season was split down the middle by three panels tacked together from wood scraps and chicken wire. Carl and Carlotta were on one side for a month until it became apparent that she had no interest in Carl and that, on the other side, Ethel had no interest in Mr. Pickle. It took a month to figure this out because the default position of a peahen is aggressive disinterest. Carl and Mr. Pickle exhausted themselves rattling feathers and prancing while Carlotta and Ethel lazily picked at bugs or things that might be bugs. Carlotta ignored Carl because his display was so pitiful. That was not unexpected. Ethel, I eventually decided, was too young: Like Carl, she’d probably come to us as a yearling. About a week after the racket started, I realized I’d made the wrong pairings and switched them up. Eudora would have been a much better name after all.

  The first egg appeared in early May. It was a pale institutional beige and big, about two times the size of a chicken egg. Carlotta had left it in a divot near the waterer, like an errant golf ball she’d sliced into a sand trap. This was exactly the way nature intended peacocks to reproduce, but my excitement was embarrassing, even to me.

  Louise was at work, but I called and left a message. “There’s an egg! Call me.” Then I called Valerie and left the same message. She called back three minutes later.

  “She laid one? Oh, good. She’s just getting started.”

  “Really? There will be more?” This came out like a yelp. “It’s like the Sea-Monkeys have crowns!”

  There was a beat or two of silence. “I’m sorry, sweetheart, what?”

  I explained how I used to beg my dad to buy me Sea-Monkeys from the comic book ads. You just had to add water to get this instant family of Sea-Monkeys with crowns, and he always said no because they were just brine shrimp and I’d end up with a bowl of dirty water. But I kept asking and I finally got some and it was a bitter disappointment because they were just brine shrimp and in three days I had a bowl of dirty water.

  In my analogy, this first peacock egg was like getting the real as-advertised Sea-Monkeys, which so rarely happens in life when one expects the astonishing. Inside that egg was a real peacock that would one day peck his way through the shell and grow into Mr. Pickle. I felt like I was eight again.

  Valerie laughed at me, not really with me, but I could tell she appreciated my enthusiasm. We discussed the low probability of Carlotta sitting on a nest—she’d never sat before, and the pen didn’t have the sort of underbrush she would instinctively nestle into—and also, I didn’t want more peacocks. I decided to give all the eggs to Valerie to incubate, hatch, and then sell the chicks as she pleased. There was no point in them going to waste, and I wasn’t doing any of the work. Besides, she’d been advising me for free; I figured the tip for the sand alone was worth at least a dozen Spalding black shoulder India blue eggs.

  Carlotta laid another one the next day in a different spot, and two days after that, I found one in the sand beneath one of the roosts. “Perch bomb,” Valerie called it when she picked up those three. “They’ll just drop ’em.”

  Peacock eggs incubate for twenty-eight days at ninety-nine degrees, give or take half a degree, in a cabinet that keeps the temperature and humidity constant. They need to be turned at least once a day, either by hand or by machine, and on the tenth day or so, each one can be candled, which means shining a light through it to see if an embryo is developing. The infertile ones are discarded.

  All of Carlotta’s were fertile, and one of them hatched one evening in early June. Louise and I were on our way out the door to dinner when Valerie texted me a picture. He was gloriously ugly, like a teeny waterlogged duck, all legs and head, and I was sincerely giddy. I texted Valerie from the car and told her as much.

  I’M SO GLAD, she texted back. HE NEEDED A LITTLE HELP GETTING OUT, BUT THAT’S OKAY. HE’S DOING FINE. I SPENT YEARS AND YEARS AROUND TRAGEDY AND DEATH, AND IT’S JUST SO NICE TO HELP BRING NEW LIFE INTO THE WORLD.

  Chapter Twenty

  There is an
empty lot across from our house that used to be a meadow. The school down the street that owns it needed a temporary parking lot, so the trees were cut down and the brush was scraped away and most of the lot was covered with a layer of crushed and compacted stone. There is a narrow entrance through a stand of loblolly pines, and there is still meadow along the edges, tall grasses and maple saplings, bright splashes of buttercups and periwinkles in the spring and stands of goldenrod in the early autumn.

  I’d taken to walking Tater there in the mornings, after Louise took Emmett to school on her way to her office but before the school bus came for Calvin. I’d stay there, usually until the bus came and went, before I let Tater lead me back across the street.

  One morning in early October, while Tater was peeing on a sapling, my phone chirped with a notification from Google, the photo division. Rediscover this day, it read, as it does every so often. Like most people, I have a conflicted relationship with those notices. I appreciate the easy storage and occasional automatic flashback, but I’d also told Google everywhere I’d been and when, which is the sort of information no rational person should voluntarily surrender to anyone, let alone a corporation. Yet here we are.

  The day I was rediscovering that morning involved a bright green field that I did not recognize and another, dustier one with shrubs and small trees planted in neat lines. I swiped through the photos, and a shining coil of fresh concertina wire cut across the foreground. Then there were people, men and women and children, a line of them two abreast and stretching over the field until it disappeared behind a distant tree line. This was familiar. The people were refugees, mostly from Afghanistan and Syria, which had collapsed into a barbarous civil war, and they were crossing from Croatia into Hungary, where they were herded onto a rundown train next to a rundown railway station. This had happened three years earlier in a tiny village called Zákány, and the train was taking them to another border town, Hegyeshalom, from where they would walk into Austria. Before it left, the train backed onto a side rail, where volunteers had twenty minutes to distribute water and sack lunches that contained three pieces of bread, two pieces of cheese, one banana, and a cookie or a candy bar.