Peaco*cks and peahens—these are the birds known as peafowl, members of the pheasant family. Although most people call them all "peaco*cks," the word really only refers to the male bird. Just like among chickens, where the male is called a rooster or co*ck and the female is called a hen, male peafowl are peaco*cks, female peafowl are peahens, and babies are peachicks! There are two peafowl species: Indian or blue peafowl and green peafowl. Most people are familiar with the Indian peafowl, since that is the kind found in many zoos and parks.
The peaco*ck has some of the brightest feathers and one of the most impressive courting displays of any bird in the world. The Indian peaco*ck has very flashy plumage, with a bright blue head and neck, but the Indian peahen is a drab, mottled brown in comparison. The male needs his bright feathers to attract a mate, and the female needs to be able to blend in with the bushes so that predators cannot see her while she is incubating her eggs.
Unlike the Indian peafowl, the male and female green peafowl have similar coloration, although the peahen's colors are not as vibrant as the peaco*ck's, and the male has a much longer tail. Green peafowl have green, rather than blue, feathers on the head and neck. Both Indian and green peafowl have bare patches of skin around their eyes and a funny crest on the top of their head made of feathers arranged in a fan shape. The Indian peafowl’s crest looks like little dots on the end of sticks!
The peaco*ck’s back and belly have iridescent feathers in ascalepattern. But the thing that the Indian and green peaco*cks are best known for is—not the tail! These peaco*cks have a long “train,” which most people think is their tail. Actually, those long feathers are the male's tail coverts, or the feathers that cover the base of the tail. The train is covered in ocelli, which are round spots that look a lot like shining eyes.
It may seem that having such a long train and bright feathers would slow a peaco*ck down and make him an easy target for predators like mongooses, jungle cats, stray dogs, leopards, and tigers—and this is absolutely true! However, if apredatorgrabs the train, the long feathers pull out easily, and the peaco*ck can fly away.
When a peaco*ck is in his second year, he grows his first train, but it has no ocelli and is not as long as a full-grown male’s. The train gets longer and more elaborate every year after that. At about five or six years of age, it reaches its maximum splendor. The peaco*cks that are the toughest—those that are able to survive long enough to have a really impressive train—are the ones that have the most mates and offspring. The coveted blue-eyed feathers of the train are dropped once a year; new feathers immediately begin growing and are completed a few months later.
Peahens seem to prefer males with the longest trains and biggest displays. In fact, the peaco*ck’s female-attraction power is directly related to the perfection of his spectacular train, including its overall length, the number of iridescent “eyes” that are present, and even the symmetry of their patterning. It was the peaco*ck’s train that apparently set Charles Darwin to thinking about the workings of how a special kind of natural selection he called “sexual selection” might operate and how a sense of esthetic beauty might have evolved, among birds AND humans.
A legend says that the peaco*ck’s Creator gave it a horrible voice, lest its beauty make the bird overly conceited. Peafowl have 11 different calls, but the peaco*cks are the ones that really yell. They have a call that carries for a long distance and sounds like “may-AWE, may-AWE.” Some say the call sounds like a human crying for help! Peaco*cks call in the early morning and late evening, and practically all day during the breeding season.
In the past, wealthy people brought peafowl to their estates to strut about the grounds and look pretty. Then the peafowl reproduced and spread out into the surrounding areas. This caused problems in some places, because the peaco*cks made so much noise in the early morning that they became a real nuisance! With their sharp eyes, peafowl are likely to be the first to see a predator and call out a loud alarm, which conveniently alerts other wildlife in the area.
