Why keeping peafowl?
- Because we like, and are interested in birds.
- because it is nice to be surrounded by beautiful birds ( Some like aquariums and keep colourful aquarium fishes.)
- because peafowl are friendly and balanced birds why they create a comfortable and relaxed atmosphere in the garden.
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Because they fertilize the roses!
Why not to keep peafowl?
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Because their droopings often are placed where we put our feet. Their droopings also have a tendency to glue to our shoes. All coins have two sides!
- Because the birds love to climb on the roofs of our cars and damage the surface.
- Because they scream rather loudly sometimes. They have two loud sounds, one similar to the cats "mijaw", but much louder, and one more similar to the trumpeting of elephants, happily enough a bit less noisy than that of an elephant.
They usually scream more frequently during their mating season, during early spring and early summer, but they can scream also during the other seasons, but more sporadically. During summer, they can also scream in the middle of the nights (at least here i Sweden, where we have daylight nearly around the clock from the middle of May to the end of July). Being a peafowl enthusiast though, one rapidly gets used to their sounds and hardly hears them after a while. They do not, however, hold long morning, or evening concerts, as some smaller birds can do. In spite of this, bird lovers who have sensitive neighbours, have better stick to other, more silent birds.
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Our pea-cock answered the pheasant cocks in the beginning, but the latter soon preferred to abandon our immediate neighbourhood.
They probably decided not to provoke this giant pheasant, leaving him the territory without challenging any part of it.
We, on the other hand, find motor sounds and machine noises much more disturbing than the screaming of the peafowl, but to keep the good neighbourliness, one must take the neighbours nerves and patience into consideration before deciding to by and keep peafowl. Other people sometimes have different preferences concerning noise and sounds.
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Keeping peafowl
We prefer to let our peafowl walk freely in the garden. All animals remain healthier and become more beautiful when not kept in cages or fenced areas. If kept in a cage, their beautiful trains will become less glossy and impressing, as the ground in such areas usually become muddy rather soon.
If peacocks and peahens are locked in, they of course must be kept in cages with net roofs, as they are excellent flyers, compared to common hens.
In summer then, our peafowl trot around in our garden and around our buildings, picking up and eating a little of this and a little of that, both of vegetables and insects, which we believe is god for them.
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Then we have their special interest in mirrors. We soon realised that we had to set out "mirrors" here and there, to prevent them from abandon us for the neighbours, who had natural "mirrors" in their cellar windows, something we do not have on our house (and something that obviously is not found in Britain, as I learnt recently).
So I painted some glass plates black. Then we nailed some of these plates to the walls of our barn, and we also built a special "mirror holder" for one of the plates, in an area where the peafowl had a suitable surrounding. These arrangements are seen in the pictures above.
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During summer
our peacocks stay out all the time. At dusk they fly up on a branch, high up in some tree, where they sleep during the nights. Our peahen though, prefers to sleep in the barn also in summer, if she has chickens.
When the leaves start to fall off the trees and the autumn storms begin all of them prefer to sleep in the barn, to which they always have access. We feed them in there during winter, as when we have snow, they prefer to stay inside all the time. Then they trot around on the floor in the big barn during daytime and sleep on the thick wooden beams under the roof during the nights. It is important that they have thick beams to sit on when it is cold, as they can freeze their feet if they have to sit on thin beams, where they have to grip very hard around the beams with their feet in order to be able to sit on it.
We soon found out that we had to turn the light on in the barn, in order to get them to walk in there in the evenings, as they do not dare to walk in if it is dark inside. At their sleeping time, it is already darkening and then they can not see into the barn, as it is quite black in there viewed from outside, and obviously they find it too nerve breaking to trot into a totatally black and unknown destiny. With the light on until they have settled down for the night though, they do not hesitate to walk in there and settle down for the night.
They usually do not like snow, some of them become really scared by it the first time they experience it. When we have snow, they usually do not leave the barn even though the door is always open for them.
Feeding
We feed our peafowl turkey food and that seems to be quite all right. (We have heard that some people feed their peafowl pig food, something we have never tried). But we also use to give them some pieces of bread, and scraps from our table sometimes, something they seem to appreciate. They are especially fond of pasta.
In order to keep mice and rats away from their food we have hang up their "food tank" in a chain, a little bit above the floor.
Our chicks though, are fed with special food for pheasant chicks and they must have their food on a flat plate on the floor at the beginning.
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The pictures on this page is clearly demonstrating how rich in colour the train feathers of the peacock is, and how different they can look under different circumstances, all depending on the light, and how it is falling on their feathers. Sometimes the feathers are bright green, sometimes they are golden or red-brown.
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