How it started
I drove up in front of the house of my friend when I heard a sudden, sharp and most heartbreaking "mijauu". I immediately stopped the car, opened the door and more or less throw myself out of the car, expecting the worst. I was convinced that I had just driven over the cat.
My friend just stood their, welcoming and calmly smiling at me. How could she look so happy when I had just killed her cat?
- Oh no, it was only the peacock.
I stared stupidly at the beautiful peacock which proudly walked on into the garden.
- You can have one of the young peacocks if you want, my friend said, and before I had thought it over, I heard myself answering yes.
I had to catch one of them myself in order to get it, so now there was only the trouble of catching one of them. I spent an hour, or two, in the cage into which the two young peacocks had been deceived, trying to do so. It was easier said than done. It was here I started to doubt the conviction of all biologists and theorists of evolution, who ever since Darwin have stated that the long tails of the peacocks have evolved to their disadvantage. The bodies, under the feathers, were ridiculously small and thin. Every time I managed to get grip of one of the cocks, I found myself standing there, with a beautiful long tail feather in my hand, while the cock already was somewhere else. At least in our cat-and rat-game, their tails were definitely to their advantage and not to mine.
To make a long story short, I eventually managed to catch one of them, at the cost of broken glasses, some smaller injuries, caused by their rather strong hits with their wings as I nearly had them caught in my arms. Thereby I was the owner of a peacock.
We got a yearling and after a week, during which the cock had lived in our, since long empty hens house, we let him out. I had managed to get him tame enough nearly to eat from my hand before we let him get his freedom again.
He made himself at home and investigated his new environment for a day or two before he decided that it was too boring and left us. He simply disappeared.
Depressing!
There was that peacock a fairy tail, we thought, and started to ask for him around our neighbourhood.
He was not far away, only a few hundred meters down the road, in our neighbours garden. We again managed to catch him and put him into the hens' house. Now we decided that he needed a wife. Hens usually stay at home and cocks usually prefer to be where the hens are.
After some searching, we found a breeder 300 km away, who could deliver a one-year-old hen. Nine hundred crowns (appr.90 dollars) poorer, I travelled down to the coast to fetch her, from a person who took her with him from the breeder.
The cock seemed happy about his new wife and the hen seemed to accept her new fiancé too, very promising we believed. Peafowl after all, are balanced and calm birds, even if they can demonstrate impressing explosions of flight panics when the situation so demands.
After a few weeks we thought it was time to let them out, and decided to start with the hen, which ought to stay at home, as bird females use to do. I opened the door to the hens' house one day and she stepped out, after a little time of hesitation - and immediately disappeared totally. - Seriously sad, she had cost us a fortune. We still had the cock at least. He was safely locked in.
After one week, a neighbour came over and told us that the hen trotted around a club house about two kilometres away. We brought a cage, went over there and managed to catch her by placing some pasta pieces in the cage. It was late autumn and she seemed rather hungry.
Now we noticed something that we ought to have realized much earlier. The club house had windows near the ground, in which the hen mirrored herself all the time. That was exactly what the cock had done when he had preferred to move on to our neighbours. These birds love to mirror themselves and we do not have windows at that height on our place in which they could do so, Therefore we made some mirrors (by black-painting boards of glass on their backsides) and put them on the stable and barn walls, in the height for the peacock and his hen. That solved our problem - at least for the moment. After that, they were so busy walking around looking at their mirror pictures in the mirrors, that they stayed at our place.
As we were to find out a few years later, this was not enough. When our couple had increased in number, and become a small group of peacocks, they obviously wanted to widen their territory. Now they again started to harass our neighbours, a problem that had to be dealt with at once. We soon understood that in order to able to let them walk around freely, we had to keep only a few of them, so, we sold the two year old cocks and again our problem was solved. Now the oldest cock, which we kept, didn't want to emigrate by his own but preferred to stick to the hen and her chickens.
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