Why Peacocks?

by Sean Flynn

  The next morning, I repeated the blueberry routine. The third morning, when the blueberries had been depleted, I switched to cherry tomatoes picked from the garden and cut into quarters. I was a bit smug about this because Martha Stewart had noted in a blog post that her birds “get lots of fresh, organic treats from my gardens.” I had only one garden, but it was indeed organic. None of the birds appreciably noticed: Comet and Snowball ate organic tomatoes with the same greedy vigor as grocery-store blueberries, and Ethel and Mr. Pickle ignored both with the same frozen stillness until I left. Carl pecked at the dirt.

  * * *

  After five days, I still hadn’t seen Mr. Pickle hoist his feathers, a delay that was becoming unsettling. A peacock displaying his feathers couldn’t possibly be a rare thing: I knew nothing about the physiology or behavior of the bird, but I had a decent grasp of its usefulness as a simile, and that peacock is forever flaunting his finery.

  Granted, the clichés almost always are employed as a pejorative. To be as proud as a peacock is never intended as a compliment but, rather, always understood to imply vanity. To be as pretty as a peacock is not flattering, either, even if it’s meant to be, because the mere invocation of the word hints that one is trying much too hard. (And to be told one “is a peacock in everything but beauty,” as Oscar Wilde wrote, is just devastating.) As a verb, peacocking is straight mockery, though those being mocked typically are too busy peacocking to realize they should be offended. The Peacock Effect, meanwhile, is a psychological reference to the tendency of boys to show off in front of girls that arises in discussions of politics and marketing and schooling, and never favorably. We are taught even as children that the peacock is a difficult bird: Aesop repeatedly employed it as a reliable stand-in for arrogance and useless pride.

  Implicit in all of those clichés is a peacock in full flower, and clichés work only if they’re based on a common frame of reference. The reason “pretty as a royal flycatcher” or “proud as a puffer fish” never caught on is that hardly anyone can gather a mental image of what the industrious puffer fish should be proud of or what a royal flycatcher even looks like. But everyone can visualize, instantly, a peacock with his feathers splayed in an arc. It’s a trademark silhouette, as recognizable as the Nike swoosh or McDonald’s arches or, more obviously, the NBC peacock.

  Yet no fair observer would accuse Mr. Pickle, his feathers dragging through the dirt, of insufferable pride.

  I began to fret that he was a defective peacock. No, not defective: broken. That I broke him, if we’re being honest about the situation. Broke his spirit, anyway.

  Early on the afternoon of the sixth day—I varied the time, depending on what else I had to do—I settled onto the half-bale with a fistful of cut-up tomatoes and tossed a chunk toward Ethel. As soon as it landed, she stabbed her beak into the straw, plucked up the tomato, and swallowed. She wasn’t skittish about it; she didn’t appear to be keeping one eye on me in case I tried to grab her. It was as if she’d forgotten I was there, except then she looked at me. Expectantly, I thought, because I’d fallen into a habit of pretending that I knew what my birds were thinking.

  She was about seven feet away. I tossed another piece, landed it a few inches in front of her. She picked it up, swallowed. Another one, not quite as far. She took a step forward, ate it. One more piece, a good eighteen inches short of her. She lifted a foot, looked from me to the tomato to me, and put her foot back down.

  Mr. Pickle and Carl stayed far away, watching.

  I considered this impressive progress for the day. I exited the pen, dropped the rest of the tomatoes for Comet and Snowball, and walked down to my office, a straight line across the grass and past Cosmo’s grave. I wasn’t there long, maybe a couple of hours, before I started back across the lawn.

  A rustle caught my attention, the sound of a large desiccated bush being shaken. I stopped, tried to locate the source. The noise went off again, but it was more of a riffle than a rustle, more precise, cleaner, like a dealer shuffling a deck of cards with the edges gone soft.

  Until that moment, I had no idea that peacocks made noise with their feathers. Even from thirty yards out and screened by chicken wire, Mr. Pickle was breathtaking.

  I moved deliberately, torn between wanting to hurry and not wanting to spook him. The wire seemed to melt as I got closer, overwhelmed by the glow from inside the pen. Mr. Pickle turned toward me, his beak slightly open, as if he were mouth-breathing. His train was spread in a half-circle nine feet across, as high as my chin, and curling gently forward at the top. Except his feathers were no longer individual appendages. They were parts of a woven whole, an elaborate tapestry of gold and blue and turquoise. His breast and neck were a tapered sapphire wedge against the green-gold scales between his shoulders, which formed a smaller, denser half-circle, like a nova core exploding.

  Mr. Pickle shuffled his feet, twisted a few degrees to the east, and the turquoise darkened to a deep jade. He turned back with tiny steps, and the turquoise returned. The top of his arc began to deflate ever so slightly, and then he rattled his feathers and the arc was full again. The entire train was alive, rippling like water, yet the eye at the end of each feather appeared to be floating on the surface, barely disturbed.

  I was inches from Mr. Pickle, pressed up against the wire, but he did not back away. He was not startled. Quite the opposite—he was performing. He wanted me to watch. It was so unexpectedly intimate that I felt a prickle of embarrassment. But I couldn’t possibly look away.

  Chapter Five

  We probably could have muddled along on our own, figured out peacock husbandry as needed. We’d done all right with Comet and Snowball. On the other hand, that strategy had proven suboptimal with Emmett’s ball python. And Mr. Pickle’s size and plumage suggested (admittedly without any evidentiary basis) that he was more complicated than a chicken, that peacocks had more moving parts and required more particular care. I decided to seek professional advice.

  I searched “bird vet near me,” and the first result was the appropriately blunt thebirdvet.com. His name was Dr. Greg Burkett, and his website identified him as a “board-certified avian veterinarian.” His picture was at the top left: He was a cheerful-looking bald man in his fifties wearing a white lab coat over blue scrubs. A little bird with green wings, a white breast, a yellow throat, and a black head perched on his finger, trained well enough to turn toward the camera. On the right side of the home page was a head shot of a white duck with a bill that appeared to be shaped from putty. “Donate today,” the caption read, “and help Dr. Burkett apply prosthetics for birds in need!”

  That was my man right there. I called and made an appointment for the following week.

  * * *

  I hadn’t recognized the address, but it turned out that I’d driven past Dr. Burkett’s office more times than I could count over the years. I’d even used it as a landmark. “Turn right at that weird bird place,” I’d say when I gave people directions, because that’s what it appeared to be, a weird bird place. The building is a squat craftsman bungalow set back on a corner lot in the deep shade of oak trees, a kind of permanent dusk that can trick the eye into seeing warped clapboards and sagging beams, a tint of mildew. For years, there was a sign at the edge of the road, a red parrot bulging from a large square of molded white plastic gone yellow with age, that identified the place as “The Birdie Boutique: A Parrot Lover’s Paradise.” But there was no mention of veterinary services, let alone of cutting-edge avian medicine. I had always imagined a woman of a certain age doddering about inside, rearranging bird toys and birdseed and bird cages in the parlor, waiting for an occasional customer to peer in from the porch but not really caring if one ever came.

  Up close, the building appeared to be in fine shape, a cottage reconfigured into a medical office and bird-supply shop. The former living room was an ambiguously tropical reception area. A thatched awning, the kind you’d find at the entrance of a tiki bar, shaded what appeared to be a rack of bird trea
ts, and a second one hung over the opening of a dark hallway. The wall behind the reception desk was a pale Carolina blue, and it was covered with a mural of a giant macaw. The bird was perched on a branch, and fronds and vines seemed to slip down the wall below the ceiling tiles. “The Birdie Boutique” was painted in a French-nouveau font next to the macaw.

  To the right, a weary, worried-looking woman fidgeted in a chair. On the floor next to her was a dirty cat carrier from which I could clearly hear the frustrated clucks of a chicken. To the left was the retail section—the toys and feed I’d always suspected were there—and a large cage with the same bird I’d seen perched on Burkett’s finger on his website.

  The young woman behind the desk noticed me looking at him. “He’s a caique,” she said with a calm smile. “His name’s Elvis. See? Because of the black hair. And it looks like he’s wearing orange pants.”

  I hadn’t noticed orange pants in the photo. I leaned in for a better look. Elvis was clinging to the side of his cage, chattering, friendly. “Oh, careful,” she said. “He’s a biter.”

  I glanced over my shoulder to see if she was being serious and noticed the sign on the wall behind her: “Safety First! Julie has worked 3 days without being bitten!”

  “I’m here to see Dr. Burkett about some peacocks,” I said.

  “And he is waiting for you,” Julie said. “Just through that door.”

  * * *

  When Greg Burkett was a kid, his favorite television program was Baretta, a cop show that ran for four seasons on ABC in the late 1970s. It starred Robert Blake as a plainclothes detective named Tony Baretta who, in what was not yet entirely a stereotype, lived in a cruddy hotel room and drove a rusted rattle trap of a car, in his case a 1966 Impala he called the Blue Ghost. Baretta seeded seventies pop culture with such phrases as “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,” and Blake won an Emmy for best actor in a drama after the first season. (Thirty years later, in perhaps the grimmest irony of cop-show actors, he was acquitted of hiring a pair of low-rent hitmen to shoot his second wife in the head, though a civil jury later found him responsible for her death and ordered him to pay her estate $30 million. An appeals court later halved it, but Blake still filed for bankruptcy.)

  Baretta’s sidekick was a bird. A Triton sulphur-crested cockatoo, specifically, which is a big white parrot native to New Guinea with a bright yellow tuft on its head. The bird’s name was Fred, and Fred was why Baretta was Burkett’s favorite show. “When Fred came on and he talked and he rolled over and he drank from the liquor bottle and he answered the phone, that was it for me,” he told me. “I watched that show every week for that damned bird.”

  In fact, Burkett decided that he wanted to train other birds to do Fred-like things. He’d always wanted to work in the movies—his uncle managed a theater in Kinston, a little city on the North Carolina coastal plain where he grew up, and his cousin ran a drive-in in Columbia, South Carolina—and teaching birds how to do tricks, how to act, was about as cool a movie job as one could have short of being a star.

  In the summer of 1977, between Baretta seasons three and four and when Burkett was fourteen years old, his father retrofitted the family van into a serviceable camper and drove to California with Burkett, his mom, and his sister for a vacation. One of the highlights was a tour of Universal Studios, where Baretta was filmed. Burkett saw the Blue Ghost, and he sat through a show at the Animal Actors School Stage, which was, as the name suggests, a trained-animal show.

  There were at least two cockatoos involved. The trainers running the show told the tourists that those birds had appeared on Baretta, which was possible—a female named LaLa did the close-up Fred scenes, but the show used several other cockatoos as well—and, to a fourteen-year-old boy, completely believable. Because he wanted to teach birds to perform, Burkett made it a point to corner the bird trainer after the show to ask him questions. He remembered the bird man was tall, with thick gray hair, and he remembered what the bird man told him: “I hate this job. Same thing every day. Hate it.”

  “That was the gist of it,” Burkett told me. “ ‘I hate my job, I hate my life.’ ”

  (That would not have been the Freds’ regular trainer. Ray Berwick was a Hollywood legend who trained more than twenty-five thousand animals, by his count, including all of the birds in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. In the 1980s, he wrote a book called Ray Berwick’s Complete Guide to Training Your Cat, which, as anyone who’s ever owned a cat will testify, could have been written only by a person with a deep and patient love of animals.)

  In any case, Burkett was crushed. He spent the four-day return drive to Kinston in the back of the van trying to figure out a new line of future employment. Which he did: By the time the Chevy crossed the North Carolina state line, he had decided to become a bird veterinarian. It was a spectacular leap, from television cockatoo trainer to avian medicine. An epiphany, he said, a vision that was clear and sudden and unmistakably true. “I don’t know why I had this idea I could doctor a bird,” he said, “other than that they’re living creatures and need someone to take care of them.”

  He mowed lawns and cleaned gutters until he had enough money to buy a pair of cockatiels from the pet store at the Vernon Park Mall. He named them Bonnie and Clyde and kept them in a cage in his room, where he expected them to breed so he could sell the hatchlings and start working his way up in the bird business. But he’d been sold a brother and sister; Bonnie laid only three eggs, one of which never hatched and the second of which contained a deformed bird that quickly died. The third, however, produced a healthy cockatiel that Burkett’s father adopted as his own. He called her Pumpkin Cheeks on account of the daubs of orange on her face, and never caged her but instead let her perch on his shoulder as he went about his business. It was sweet, a grown man so infatuated with a bird.

  With the cockatiels otherwise a bust, Burkett bought some budgies, which Americans insist on calling parakeets and which he’d seen performing in an old movie called Bill and Coo. They’re reliable breeders, and he did all right selling baby budgies to people and occasionally pet stores, but he took a break when he went to college. By 1988, he was waiting to enroll in veterinary school and breeding birds in a basement. At the 1990 Great Smoky Mountains Bird Show, he met his wife, Missy (with whom he eventually would breed a lot of birds, fifteen thousand, ballpark, among thirty-five species); three years later, he graduated from vet school; and the year after that, he bought the house that he turned into an office. He had to evict the vagrant sleeping on a cot in the kitchen that’s now the operating room.

  * * *

  Burkett was standing behind a stainless-steel table in what might have been a pantry at some point. He had an assistant next to him and notes on the table. He wasn’t wearing the white coat, but he had on blue scrubs, and there was a silver lightning bolt in his left earlobe.

  “So you’ve got peacocks,” he said, more of a bemused statement than a question. He did not ask me why, either.

  “Yep. Three. Two boys and a girl.”

  “Oh, that’s not good. We’ll get to that.”

  He asked me where I was keeping them and what I was feeding them. I described the coop, and he said it could be bigger but it wasn’t dangerously cramped. I told him Barnes Supply had recommended Purina Game Bird Chow, and that I was surprised it existed, let alone that there were four varieties. My birds were on the growth-and-plumage maintenance formulation because… well, plumage, I guessed. That was a reasonable diet, Burkett said, though I should add fruit and greens and sunflower seeds.

  “They seem to like blueberries,” I said brightly, as if I’d thought of something else for his list. “And tomatoes.”

  “Um, yeah, they would,” he said. “Those are, you know, fruits.”

  He had notes on parasites and worming and symptoms of illness, all of which he presented with a good amount of jolliness. “Now, if you notice a bird is sick, he’s been sick for at least three days,” he said. “They’re very g
ood at hiding it, so by the time you see it, he’s really sick. So you should bring him in.”

  “Okay. So far no one seems sick. But when can I let them out?” I was hoping he’d have a more optimistic time line than Danielle, maybe tell me a month, tops.

  He raised his eyebrows. “Never.”

  “What?”

  “Never. Not if you want to keep them.”

  I frowned. This couldn’t be right. “I was told a couple of months.”

  “Sure, you can let them out after a couple of months. And they’ll fly away.”

  “Where?”

  “Somewhere else,” he said. “Looking for other birds. Especially with two males and a female. That should be the other way around. At least. Four hens for every cock is a good ratio.”

  Shit. Danielle had called my trio “a social clique.”

  “So I gotta keep these penned forever?”

  “I would.” An awkward silence followed. “Who told you a couple of months?”

  I told him the whole story, leaning hard into the part about the savage owl.

  “That didn’t happen.” He said it so flatly, so immediately, that I almost missed it.

  “What? Of course it happened. The woman we got them from told us a giant owl showed up, and then she started finding birds with their heads torn off.”

  “I guess it’s possible. But an owl usually wouldn’t just bite off a peacock’s head and leave the rest,” he said. “A raccoon would, and probably just to be mean. Awful animals. Vile. But an owl would try to carry it away or stay and eat it. So would a coyote or a fox, if it could. If you only find some feathers, a coyote or a fox got it. If it disappears completely, that’s an owl. If it’s just dead, that’s probably a dog that didn’t know what to do with it once it killed it.”