by Sean Flynn
I’m also lucky to live in a place with so many other writers who are unfailingly supportive and generous, including Bronwen Dickey, David A. Graham, Haven Kimmel, Barry Yeoman, and Jason Zengerle. I’m grateful, too, to Eric and Lisa Guckian, John and Susan Haws, and Ted Miller and Bernadette Carr. Thank you.
Calvin and Emmett are never-ending sources of wonder and joy—unfailingly kind, preternaturally curious and, at times, supremely patient. I am more proud of them every day.
Finally, one reason to fall in love with another writer, to borrow a sentence, is self-evident: These words would not have made it to paper without the patience, counsel, and tireless creative labors of Louise Jarvis Flynn. The story wouldn’t exist without her, obviously, but it might not have been written, either. Louise is my first, best editor, in this and everything, and will be always. Her talents are boundless, as is my love for her.
About the Author
© ANDREW OVENDEN
Sean Flynn is a National Magazine Award–winning journalist and author who’s reported from six continents during the past thirty years. His work has been widely anthologized and translated into nearly a dozen languages. A longtime correspondent for GQ, he lives in North Carolina with his wife and their two boys.
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Notes on Sources
This is a work of nonfiction and memoir. All the people are real, as are the memories, and wherever possible those memories have been checked against those of the people involved. Personal interviews accounted for much of the remaining research, and those conversations are apparent throughout the text; some sources, such as books and newspapers, are noted, as well.
But space and clarity preclude noting every source directly in the text, whether a helpful human or an academic paper, internet database or newspaper archive. In chapter one, for instance, I incorporated the transcript of an oral history interview with Lee “Shorty” Barnes conducted by Michael Smith on June 13, 2000; and chapter two uses information from the Journal of Ophthalmic Prosthetics, fall 2015 issue. The Oscar Wilde quote in chapter four is from “The Picture of Dorian Gray” (Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine, July 1890).
Details in chapter five were gleaned from IMDB.com, nostalgia.com, and the archives of Reuters, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, and UPI. Chapter six was informed by the web archives of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and the work of composers Paul Winter, Jim Scott, and Paul Halley. The quote on page 75 is from P. Thankappan Nair’s “The Peacock Cult in Asia,” published in 1974 by Nanzan University in Asian Folklore Studies, Vol. 33, No. 2.
For chapter eight, Roslyn Dakin analyzed observational data of peacocks displaying; and Nathan Hart, who is the head of the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, explained the physiology of avian eyesight.
The letters excerpted in chapter nine were retrieved from the Darwin Correspondence Program at the University of Cambridge. John Ruskin’s quote is from The Stones of Venice, Volume One, published in 1894. I also used information from Greenpeace East Asia, the archives of Beijing Review and Bloomberg, and the April 1966 issue of The Auk (volume 83, issue 2). An enormous number of academic studies informed the general background and some specific details, most notably the work of Roslyn Dakin of Carleton University in Ottawa, Suzanne Amador Kane of Haverford College in Pennsylvania, Robert Montgomerie of Queen’s University in Ontario, Jessica Yorzinski of Texas A&M University, Michael L. Platt of Duke University in Durham, and Jian Zi of Fudan University in Shanghai.
Chapter eleven drew upon the work of Kristopher Poole, a zooarcheologist at the University of Sheffield, particularly his chapter in “Extinctions and Invasions: A Social History of British Fauna,” edited by Terry O’Conner and Naomi Sykes (Windgather Press, 2010). Alan Bergo of Forager/Chef provided the culinary basics; and Suzanne Turner Associates compiled a timeline of Fredric Church’s Olana estate.
I drew upon research by photographer, journalist, and author Vicki A. Mack in chapter thirteen, as well as records kept by Mary Gliksman and the archives of Los Angeles magazine, particularly the January 2016 story “Who’s Been Killing the Feral Peacocks of Palos Verdes?” by Mike Kessler. The California Digital Newspaper Collection, a project of the Center for Bibliographical Studies and Research at the University of California, Riverside, was invaluable.
In chapter fourteen, the damage peacocks can do to a crop field was quantified in a 2018 study by Suresh K. Govind of the Forest Research Institute and E. A. Jayson of Christ College that was published in the journal Indian Birds. Chapter fifteen would not have happened without the assistance of Dunfermline Press reporter Gemma Ryder, peafowl warden Suzi Ross, and local historians Jack Pryde and Frank Connolly.
My neurosis about the world’s dwindling supply of sand in chapter sixteen was stoked by, among others, Vince Beiser in Wired (“The Deadly Global War for Sand,” March 2015); David Owen in the New Yorker (“The World is Running Out of Sand,” May 22, 2017); and Harald Franzen writing for Deutsche Welle (“Could we run out of sand?” November 28, 2017). Brad Legg and his son Brandon grounded me in peacock genetics and breeding for chapter seventeen.
The California Digital Newspaper Collection was essential in chapter eighteen, as were the archives of Modern Game Breeding and Hunting and Aviculture. And the notion in chapter twenty-one that cats would kill us if they could is a (perhaps glib) extrapolation from a 2014 University of Edinburgh study published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology.
Selected Bibliography
al-Kisa’i. Tales of the Prophets. Translated from the eleventh-century original by Wheeler M. Thackston Jr. Chicago: Kazi Publications, 1997.
Anand, Anita, and William Dalrymple. Koh-i-Noor: The History of the World’s Most Infamous Diamond. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.
Arakelove, Victoria, and Garnik S. Asatrian. The Religion of the Peacock Angel: The Yezidis and Their Spirit World. London: Routledge, 2014.
Attar. The Conference of the Birds. Translated by Shoaled Wolpé. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.
Bergman, Josef. The Peafowl of the World. Hindhead, England: Saiga Publishing, 1980.
Bland, Bartholomew F., ed. Strut: The Peacock and Beauty in Art. New York: Fordham University Press, 2014.
Brunner, Bernd. Birdmania: A Remarkable Passion for Birds. Vancouver: Greystone Books, 2017.
Carnegie, Andrew. The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1920.
———. The Gospel of Wealth. Boston: North American Review, June 1889.
Chopra, Praveen. Vishnu’s Mount: Birds in Indian Mythology and Folklore. Chennai, India: Notion Press, 2017.
Glasscock, Carl B. Lucky Baldwin: The Story of an Unconventional Success. Reno: Silver Syndicate Press, 1993.
Hansen, Waldemar. The Peacock Throne: The Drama of Mogul India. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972.
Hazard, Mary Jo. The Peacocks of Palos Verdes. Los Angeles: Donegal Publishing Company, 2010.
Ingraham, Corinne. The Peacock and the Wishing-Fairy and Other Stories. New York: Brentano’s, 1921.
Jackson, Christine E. Peacock. London: Reaktion Books, 2006.
Latham, John. A General History of Birds, Vol. III. London: Henry G. Bohn, 1823.
Lawler, Andrew. Why Did the Chicken Cross the World? The Epic Saga of the Bird that Powers Civilization. New York: Atria Books, 2014.
Mack, Vicki A. Frank A. Van
derlip: The Banker Who Changed America. Palos Verdes Estates: Pinale Press, 2013.
McAdam, Pat, and Snider, Sandy. Arcadia: Where Ranch and City Meet. Arcadia: Friends of the Arcadia Library, 1981.
Merrill, Linda. The Peacock Room: A Cultural Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998.
Montgomery, Sy. Birdology: Adventures with a Pack of Hens, a Peck of Pigeons, Cantankerous Crows, Fierce Falcons, Hip Hop Parrots, Baby Hummingbirds, and One Murderously Big Living Dinosaur. New York: Free Press, 2010.
Morales, Becky, Ernie Morales, and Evie Ybarra. Images of America: Rancho Sespe. Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2017.
Moyle, David. Living with Peacocks. iUniverse, 2006.
Nicoll, Fergus. Shah Jahan. New York: Penguin Viking, 2009.
Pauly, Thomas H. Zane Grey: His Life, His Adventures, His Women. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2015.
Prum, Richard O. The Evolution of Beauty. New York: Doubleday, 2017.
Roberts, Michael. Peacocks Past and Present. Devon, England: Gold Cockerel Books, 2003.
Ryan, Michael J. A Taste for the Beautiful: The Evolution of Attraction. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018.
St. John, Percy B. The Young Naturalist’s Book of Birds: Anecdotes of the Feathered Creation. Sherbourn Lane, London: Joseph Rickerby, 1838.
Snider, Sandy. Historic Santa Anita. Arcadia, CA: California Arboretum Foundation, 1976.
Sopa, Geshe Lhundub, Leonard Zwilling, and Michael J. Sweet. Peacock in the Poison Grove: Two Buddhist Texts on Training the Mind. Boston: Wisdom Publications, 1996.
Taillevent. Le Viandier. Translated by Jim Chevallier as How to Cook a Peacock. North Hollywood: Chez Jim, 2004.
Webster, Noah. History of Animals; Being the Fourth Volume of Elements of Useful Knowledge. New Haven: Howe & Deforest, 1812.
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Interior design by Joy O’Meara
Jacket design by Evan Gaffney
Peacock on chair by Catherine Ledner/Getty Images;
Feathers by Douglas Sacha/Getty Images;
Spine photograph by Globalp/Getty Images
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Flynn, Sean, 1964- author. Title: Why peacocks? : an unlikely search for meaning in the world’s most magnificent bird / Sean Flynn. Description: New York : Simon & Schuster, 2021. | Includes bibliographical. | Summary: “An acclaimed journalist seeks to understand the mysterious allure of peacocks-and in the process discovers unexpected and valuable life lessons”—Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020056708 (print) | LCCN 2020056709 (ebook) | ISBN 9781982101077 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781982101084 (paperback) | ISBN 9781982101091 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Peafowl—Anecdotes. Classification: LCC QL795.P43 F59 2021 (print) | LCC QL795.P43 (ebook) | DDC 598.6/258—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056708
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020056709
ISBN 978-1-9821-0107-7
ISBN 978-1-9821-0109-1 (ebook)
