Peacock amnesty

 

Feb 3, 2025: With our first snowfall, it feels like winter has finally arrived on Gabriola. Our uninvited flock of pesky peacocks—who roost at night in the trees above our garage, crash onto our house roof every morning when they awake and then spend their days foraging on our property—hate the cold and snow. No surprise, since they are a tropical species, although these particular birds were born here, the legacy of an irresponsible exotic farm owner at our end of the island who abandoned his animals several decades ago when he left the island. Consequently, his guinea fowl, wild turkeys and peacocks have naturalized on our island, creating roaming flocks of various sizes. This particular flock has adopted our property as their home no matter how relentlessly we try to discourage them. They may be pretty but they force us to continuously clean up the large piles of excrement they leave behind. Plus, I can plant nothing that overwinters since they eat everything green they can find.

However, when it snows, we feel sorry for them.

Bedraggled and miserable, they huddle under the garage overhang or press against the foundation of our house (peering in at us through the windows), or wherever they can find an area clear of snow. Instead of our usual routine of chasing them off our covered deck multiple times a day, we let them take shelter there. On occasion in the past, we have even fed them to keep them going. This amnesty lasts only as along as there is snow. As soon as it's gone, we'll be running after them again with a broom or spraying them with a hose if it's above zero. It's a love-hate relationship. We've tried multiple times to get rid of this flock, to no avail. What's particularly frustrating is that they no longer fear us and pretend to leave the deck, walking away in insolent slowness, only to return the moment we are back indoors. I often have to push them off the railing to get them to move away from the deck. 

Hopefully, in the spring, as they have done in previous years, they will decamp to their "summer grounds" down the hill in the valley, with its large wetland with a stream running through it. This mystifying seasonal migration of less than .5K "as the crow flies" lets me plant a few vegetables in pots and harvest most of them before the peacocks return at the end of the growing season to eat everything in sight. They are rapacious omnivores with epicurean tastes. In warmer weather, they will lie in the mud baths they create in my herb bed, stretching out their long necks to snip off oregano and other herbs. This is the first wild animal I've encountered that likes herbs. Not even deer will touch them.