by Sean Flynn
I went to Barnes Supply on the second day of January and bought two brooder lamps with clamps and two bulbs. I hung the lamps with steel wire and, directly below, set a board across a pair of sawhorses. I eyeballed the gap and was pretty sure Mr. Pickle wouldn’t scorch his crest.
The front edge of the peacock pen was a wall of thin wire. A strong wind would overwhelm whatever heat my puny lamps generated. A windbreak of plastic sheeting would take at least ten degrees off the chill, maybe twenty. I got a staple gun and a utility knife, climbed a ladder, and began tacking up plastic. As darkness fell, my hands were stiff, almost numb, but I felt a pinch in the side of my forefinger, then saw a blot of red slide down the plastic. A trail of blood curled around to my palm. My finger didn’t hurt, but the blood was smearing the plastic. I climbed down and went inside to wash out the wound and strangle it shut with three plastic bandages. When I came back out, the glow of the red lights behind the blood-smeared plastic gave the pen the look of a cheap and dangerous brothel.
Only half of it was sheltered, but it was a fine bit of jerry-rigging. From the inside, it had the cast of an overlit old-fashioned darkroom. I waved my hands under the lamps and felt a blush of warmth. I stood on the exposed side, then sidestepped to the wind-broken side, then back. “What do you think?” I said to the birds. They were busily picking through the fresh hay I’d bought when I got the lamps. They loved new hay.
The temperature kept dropping, and before I went to bed, I trudged out to the pen to see how the birds were adjusting. Comet and Snowball were snugged into their little hutch inside the big coop, their only complaint seeming to be that I’d disturbed them.
But in the peacock pen, the perch beneath the lamps was empty. All three birds had moved into the exposed half, the colder half. Mr. Pickle was on a plank in the back corner. Carl was on a branch in the middle. And Ethel was perched up front near the wire, wind ruffling her feathers, as close to a polar vortex as she could get.
Chapter Nine
The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail,” Charles Darwin once wrote, “whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!”
It was a passing thought in a letter to his friend Asa Gray, the famous botanist. Darwin wrote it in April 1860, a few months after the publication of his seminal work, On the Origin of Species, which explained his theory of natural selection and survival of the fittest and how slight, incremental changes allowed species to adapt and evolve over time. The challenge of explaining the peculiarities of creation with a grand theory became, at times, too much to bear. “I remember well time when the thought of an eye made me cold all over,” he wrote. Yet having demonstrated quite elegantly how an eyeball would have evolved, Darwin still had to reconcile all of the nagging curiosities, the “small trifling particulars” that seemed to contradict, or at least ignore, his theory.
Like the peacock.
A peacock’s profusion of unwieldy, eye-catching feathers did not fit tidily into Darwin’s principles of selection for survival. Nature was full of such maddening examples. There were others Darwin could have mentioned in his letter—the call of a bullfrog, for instance, or the antlers on a moose, both of which appear to be potential disadvantages to a long and healthy life. But he went with the peacock, probably, because it’s an easy visual, almost a parody of evolutionary biology: The bird’s ostentatious ridiculousness, as I’d mentioned to Dean Daniel at St. John the Divine, presumably should have gotten it eaten frequently enough by jaguars to nudge it toward more subdued and shorter plumage if not hurtle it into outright extinction. The peacock’s train is heavy and seemingly cumbersome, two hundred feathers almost five feet long that one would think would make running difficult and flying awkward. It is also a screaming advertisement, regularly unfolded into a glittering half-circle billboard more than nine feet across that the peacock deliberately vibrates and rattles. Survival of the fittest should not, generally speaking, favor a bird that enthusiastically announces its presence to predators it cannot easily escape.
What’s more, the peacock sheds the entire ornamental rig every year, just scraps the whole train and starts over. This is, on one level, perfectly routine. All birds molt, replacing worn and damaged feathers on a regular cycle, annually for most species, more frequently for some. An adult peacock, however, is extruding feathers longer than its body, hundreds of them, at a freakish pace: To grow your hair the length of a mature peacock’s train, by comparison, would take about nine years. That requires an enormous expenditure of metabolic energy that, over the eons, surely could have been diverted into a trait more useful for avoiding jaguars or finding food or anything else related to not dying.
So why would the peacock evolve to have a train—or the moose oversize antlers or the bullfrog a full-throated croak—that might endanger, rather than enhance, its survival?
Sex. Obviously.
A peacock’s display, in its entirety, is an elaborately choreographed performance. He hoists his train, which expands as it rises, falling open like a Spanish fan. Then he vibrates those feathers, and they make a sound like a roll on a muffled snare drum. He extends his wings downward and rotates the tips in a way that looks like jazz hands, and he dances in a tight, whipping arc. He does this in front of females with, as any dope can intuit, the intention that one or more of them will be impressed enough to consent to sex. He does this, in fact, on a small stage in competitive proximity to other peacocks displaying on their small stages, the whole collection of which is referred to as a lek but might as well be called a marketplace of very aggressive sellers. The successful male—presumably well-decorated and a gifted dancer—will then pass on his genetic material, thus propagating another generation of successful, well-decorated males, and so on. None of this is remotely subtle.
But understanding to what end a peacock uses his particular tools and how those tools would be passed on does not explain why he has those tools to begin with. A peacock didn’t adapt a train in order to more efficiently crack open seeds or vigorously defend itself or make it easier to hide from predators. Under Darwin’s theory of natural selection, there is simply no excuse for it.
Which led to Darwin’s next theory, separate and distinct from natural selection, which was sexual selection.
Darwin had already begun working that out when he wrote to Asa Gray. He touched on it explicitly in On the Origin of Species, remarking that a colleague’s peahens had been especially attracted to a certain peacock. “I can see no good reason to doubt that female birds, by selecting, during thousands of generations, the most melodious or beautiful males, according to their standard of beauty, might produce a marked effect,” he wrote in that work. “[B]ut I have not space here to enter on this subject.”
Twelve years after Origins, he published that theory fully developed in his 1871 masterwork, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. The book was a best seller, and the second half of it asserted two radical notions: One was that creatures other than humans had an aesthetic sensibility, that they were capable of appreciating beauty; and the other was that females had the sexual agency to steer evolutionary ornamentation.
In other words, peacocks are so spectacularly accessorized, possibly to their physical detriment, because peahens prefer them that way. Exactly why has not been wholly settled; the peahens have not spoken directly on the matter. But it unavoidably suggests that the dowdy peahen, who remains drab so she can smartly hide her nest in a thicket and look after her hatchlings and do all the work, has coaxed from the male over untold generations a peculiar beauty that she finds pleasing.
That idea that the female of any species exerts such control, sexual or otherwise, landed with a thud in Victorian England. Animals weren’t considered developed enough to have discerning tastes and intellectual capabilities (they are and do, as a library of subsequent science has confirmed), and it was unthinkable that females could exercise dominance over males. There were also religious objections to the whole idea of evolutionary selection, natural or sexual. The pr
ominent art critic and philosopher John Ruskin was friendly with Darwin but also one of his fiercest critics. He did not believe that the beauty of the natural world was the result of endless adaptations, of flora and fauna struggling in an endless death match for survival—he believed all of it was created by God for people to enjoy. Beauty existed for the sake of beauty, an expression of the divine, and it needed no further justification or explanation. “Remember that the most beautiful things in the world,” he once wrote, “are the most useless; peacocks and lilies for instance.”
* * *
When Ruskin or Darwin wrote of peacocks, each almost certainly had in mind the species Pavo cristatus, the India blue. Peafowl are Galliformes, the same order as turkeys and pheasants and Comet and Snowball and other relatively large birds that feed on the ground, and the India blue—the variety of peacock with a sapphire breast and head—is the one with which most people are familiar. But there are two others.
Green peafowl, or Pavo muticus, of which there are three subspecies, are native to Southeast Asia and never spread in the wild beyond such steamy climes. The males tend to be taller and larger than their India blue counterparts, and they are significantly more shy around humans. Even people who raise them in captivity sometimes find them off-putting, a neurotic and fickle bird that is aggressive in the breeding season and so fragile with cold that it is, in an objective sense, the hothouse flower of domesticated peafowl.
The wild population, meanwhile, is plummeting. The International Union for Conservation of Nature put the green peacock on its red list of threatened species in 1988; as of 2009, it was categorized as endangered, two steps below extinct, with fewer than twenty thousand birds estimated to remain. Habitat loss is the main reason. Wide swaths of the green peafowls’ forests and grasslands have been consumed by agriculture and housing. In China, where it’s been listed as critically endangered since 2015, a planned $420 million hydroelectric dam would flood the largest surviving habitat in Yunnan province—which contains fewer than three hundred birds, or more than half the total believed to be alive in China. In 2017, a conservation group called Friends of Nature sued to stop construction; three years later, a court suspended the project until further reviews were completed, an unprecedented triumph for Chinese environmentalists and a reprieve for several hundred birds. The environmentalists’ success in this case speaks to the enduring power of the peacock as a kind of universal fan favorite. Their good looks are their saving grace, with plumage mightier than the Chinese government. Magical, indeed.
The third species of peafowl is the Congo, which hardly anyone can imagine because very few people have ever seen one. They are the smallest of the peacocks, half to two-thirds scale of the other two, the males a dark violet trimmed in green, the females a subdued brown with a wash of shimmering green on their backs. They live in the Congo (the peacock naming scheme—blue, green, Congo—is refreshingly utilitarian), widely scattered in the jungle underbrush yet so rarely glimpsed by outsiders that it wasn’t identified by a Western scientist until well into the twentieth century, and then only by happenstance. An American ornithologist named James P. Chapin on an expedition in 1913 noticed an unusual feather in a Congolese headdress that he recognized as a secondary flight feather, though from the wing of what bird he had no idea. Twenty-three years later, in a storeroom of the Congo Museum in Tervuren, Belgium, Chapin found two dusty, stuffed specimens that had the same curious feather. They looked a lot like peacocks. “It was a discovery of a large, major species, long after it had been assumed that no more surprises were to be expected from the Congo,” a memoriam written after Chapin’s death in 1964 noted. He named the bird Afropavo congensis and eventually found four live ones in the wild.
India blues, by comparison, are ubiquitous, often referred to as the common peacock for a reason. They are the peafowl of arboretums and English estates, of California villages and North Carolina horse farms, of ancient myths and modern art. Though they are native to the Indian subcontinent and are the national bird of India, they are global citizens of long standing: Traders and collectors began shuffling them around the planet so many centuries ago that today one is as likely to stumble upon a muster of them in a Canadian subdivision as in a forest outside of Jaipur. Depending on the translation, the Bible reports that King Solomon’s fleet of ships brought to Israel “gold, silver, ivory, apes and peacocks” almost three thousand years ago. The birds were so familiar to the Greeks that Aristotle in his History of Animals in the fourth century B.C.E. wrote about them as domesticated game—“Peafowl live for about twenty-five years, breed about the third year, and at the same time take on their spangled plumage”—and assigned to them unflattering human traits—“… jealous and self-conceited, as the peacock.” Romans raised them as decorations for landscapes and centerpieces for feasts, and as the empire spread, so did the range of the India blue: They were in Western Europe by at least the fourth century and probably earlier. It took a while for them to cross the Atlantic, but India blues have been running wild, or semi-wild, in North America since the late eighteen hundreds.
* * *
The important thing about a peacock is his train, just as the important thing about an elephant is his trunk and the important thing about a zebra is his stripes. The train is what defines a peacock, to human eyes anyway, the thing that makes it a magnificent curiosity, an extravagant presence. It is also the part of the bird that makes us wonder how it survived past the Eocene period. And yet peacocks manage just fine in the wild.
We humans, many of us—me, at least—assumed that a bright blue bird waving an enormous and sparkling green-gold flag amid grasslands and low shrubs would pop against the backdrop. That is because we (or I) assumed that the rest of Earth’s creatures see things the way we do.
They do not. Insofar as the peacock is concerned, the big cats most likely to kill it in the wild have only two types of color-receptive cones in their eyes, as opposed to three in most people and four in birds. Specifically, those predators lack red-green color discrimination, which means the shimmering plumage we see, in all probability, appears more like variations of foliage to a jaguar or a leopard. When it’s limp, the spotted strands of a peacock’s train most likely blend into the landscape just as well as any pheasant in the field.
The train is made up of between 150 and two hundred coverts anchored in the back of a mature male, each a long white stem lined with filaments sprouting like thin leaves. (Technically, those filaments are called barbs, but since there’s nothing sharp or pointy about them and they are very soft, I’m going with a less confusing layman’s term.) They come in four varieties, about three-quarters of which are topped with the iconic ocelli, though up close they resemble eyes only in a sixties-pop-art kind of way: The center is a dented oval of deep violet encircled by, in order, rings of dark blue, a coppery-bronze alloy, and finally, greenish yellow. Also, the eyespots are constructed from the same sort of filaments lining the rest of the stem, the individual strands packed so closely together that they appear to be a solid object. The longest coverts, meanwhile, end in a delicate T shape, like the tail of a dainty tropical fish; shorter ones resemble swords, curved like scimitars with blades of blue-green barbs; and the very shortest are swords with a diminutive eyespot at the tip.
A peacock’s actual tail feathers are comparatively short and wide and industrial gray and, for most of the year, hidden beneath the prettier coverts. But it’s the tail feathers that do all the work: A displaying peacock is raising his tail feathers, which in turn lift the train, like a stage set pushed into position by hidden hydraulics. As the coverts rise, they spread out, falling to each side until they fan into the familiar half-circle. The long fishtails outline the curve of that arc, the tips of each fishtail touching the tips of the tails on either side; think of a line of capital T’s in a tightly spaced row, their tops giving the appearance of dashes connected into an almost solid line. The swords form a soft, fringy edge along the bottom of the fan, and the eyespot fe
athers are distributed more or less evenly from side to side and top to bottom.
When a peacock rattles his train, the tail, again, is doing all the labor. The train appears to almost liquify, the background shimmering like a pond stirred by a strong, sudden wind. That’s because all of those filaments, thousands of them attached to all of those hundreds of feather stems, are swaying and waving all at once. But the eyespots appear to barely move, as if they are boats anchored on that rippling pond. The reason, researchers discovered in 2015, is that the filaments that form the ocelli are held together with microhooks, which allow them to act as a heavier, immovable whole while barbs farther down the shaft wiggle and wave. It’s a mesmerizing illusion.
A displaying peacock’s train is entrancing to the human (and, presumably, peahen) eye not merely because of the colors but because they are ever-changing. They brighten and fade and become other colors altogether, turquoise to copper to jade, as the peacock shifts his position, turns a few degrees one way, a few back the other. Ideally, he tries to angle himself forty-five degrees to the sun, an alignment that apparently offers peak gleam from a peahen’s perspective.
Despite their appearance, the peacock’s feathers are of no particular color at all. What look to be pretty pigments are the result of the nearly invisible structure of the feathers themselves.
Iridescence is the ability of an object to appear to change color with the angle of the light, and it has been studied in peacock feathers for centuries. Isaac Newton included them in his experiments with light in the sixteen hundreds and concluded that “their Colours arise from the thinness of the transparent parts of the Feathers.” Around the same time, the scientist Robert Hooke looked at them under a new invention called the microscope. “The beauteous and vivid colours of the Feathers of this Bird,” he wrote, “being found to proceed from the curious and exceeding smallness and fineness of the reflecting parts, we have here the reason given us of all those gauderies in the apparel of other Birds also.” They were both basically right on the big picture: Peacock feathers are constructed to refract and reflect light into the changeable colors we see. Imagine a prism splitting a beam of white light into a rainbow—it’s that general principle, only limited to a peacock-specific spectrum by its peacock-specific structure.