Why Peacocks?

by Sean Flynn

  Three hundred years after Newton, in 2003, Chinese scientists scanned peacock feathers with an electron microscope to peek at the structural details. Each of the filaments radiating from the stem is covered with tiny barbules; each of those barbules, in turn, is covered with a lattice of keratin—what your fingernails are made of—binding together rods of melanin—the stuff that makes skin dark. If that lattice is tweaked, if the rods are spaced differently and such, those barbules will appear blue or yellow or some other color.

  One could suggest then that the colors are literally coming out of the peacock, like he’s taking light and manipulating it for his own delightful purposes. Which is a much better story than the one about Hera and her dead giant’s eyes.

  * * *

  All the studies of optics and iridescence and keratin structures, fascinating as they are to people who enjoy spelunking through rabbit holes, are in a way a distraction from the elemental Darwinian point of a peacock’s train, which is: Peahens like eye candy. How the coverts are raised or why the colors shift with the angle of the sun are not questions any peahen has ever pondered. It is enough that the display is beautiful.

  But what does the discerning peahen look for in those fanned-out feathers? Is she impressed by the biggest peacock? Is she picking out clues among the eyespots and fishtails, deciphering which male is the healthiest, the strongest, the most virile? Or does she have a quirky taste in feathers, maybe a thing for extra swords? What, exactly, does a peahen look at—what does she see—when a male is displaying?

  Mostly, she looks at something else entirely. For every four minutes a peacock flaunts his train, a peahen ignores him for almost three. And when she does look, she is much more interested in lower regions, in the swords and bottom-row eyespots and, from the back, the wings. Jazz hands and rattling feathers catch her attention, but she’s decidedly disinterested in the grand sprawl of the show. She barely glances at the upper eyespots, which appear to be more useful as a long-distance lure poking above low bushes and high grass. Still, numerous studies suggest peahens are gathering information from a male’s display and using it to make a deliberate, selective choice of mate—precisely as Darwin theorized one method of sexual selection would work.

  Yet the mating ritual isn’t limited to the charms, utilitarian or aesthetic, of the peacock’s train. Roslyn Dakin, who has a doctorate in animal behavior and leads the Dynamic Behaviour Lab at Carleton University in Ottawa, was one of three researchers who discovered that the peahens’ crest—the Seussian toodle—seems to serve a functional purpose. When a peacock rattles his train, it vibrates about twenty-five times per second. It turns out the resonant frequency of a crest, the rate at which it naturally vibrates, is also about twenty-five times per second, which suggests the crests play some role in the complex ritual of display and selection. What role, precisely, is unclear—peahens do have ears, after all, and presumably can hear the rattle just fine—but that almost certainly isn’t a coincidence. Especially as it came on top of earlier research that recorded the train vibrations creating infrasonic sounds, which are too deep for humans to hear but both peahens and peacocks respond to.

  Darwin nailed the big picture, but he whiffed on the soundscape. The “vibratory movement apparently serves merely to make a noise,” he wrote in The Descent of Man, “for it can hardly add to the beauty of their plumage.” Perhaps not, but it does somehow add to the overall attractiveness of the peacock to the peahen. He’s trying to pass on his genes, after all, so he will employ whatever abilities nature gave him to entice a willing partner.

  Like, for instance, the ability to lie. Peacocks do this with shocking frequency, which Dakin figured out when she was doing fieldwork in the Los Angeles County Arboretum, among other places. If a peahen finds a peacock’s elaborate presentation worthy of sex, she will settle into a receptive position. From there follows a brief, almost comical copulation: The successful male makes a short, swooping run at the female and lets out a boastful hoot, almost like the sound of a drawn-out clown-car horn. Hoot-dash, scientists call it (though hoot-scoot would be much more fun). Other peahens will hear that sound, assume the peacock making it has been vetted by other hens, and thus consider mating with him, too. It’s the “I’ll have what she’s having” theory of peafowl reproduction.

  One third of those hoots are fake. Really. Dakin counted. She watched and she listened and she counted, and for every three hoots, there were only two scoots.

  That is the most peacocky fact ever discovered about peacocks. As if the trains and the rattling and the dancing aren’t desperate enough, those big birds routinely misrepresent their sexual prowess to try to impress peahens. It’s astonishing. Since at least Aristotle’s time, humans have been accusing peacocks of embodying unpleasant human foibles, pride and vanity, and yet somehow missed the most obvious one of all.

  Chapter Ten

  In early February, I found Carl lying in a clump of hay. He didn’t get up when I sat on the cinder block, and he didn’t move when I tossed him a blueberry. I took a few steps toward him, and he roused himself only enough to shuffle farther away. He wasn’t bleeding that I could see, so I guessed he hadn’t lost a fight with Mr. Pickle. He settled into another patch of straw and looked at the wall.

  I remembered Dr. Burkett saying birds are very good at hiding illness, so if one of them looked sick, he was really sick.

  It was almost three o’clock on a Friday, and I had to pick up Emmett from school. On the way, I called Burkett’s office and told Julie I had a sick bird and that I was going to bring some droppings to the office. I assumed Burkett would want droppings, as feces seem to be a standard multispecies diagnostic medium.

  Julie said Burkett would call me when he was finished with a patient, but I told her not to bother. I’d be there as soon as I could.

  Burkett was standing next to Julie’s desk when I opened the door. “You remember me?”

  “Oh, yeah,” he said. “The guy with the peacocks.”

  “Excellent. One of them is sick. I brought poop.”

  He laughed. “That’s what I like, poop on a Friday afternoon.”

  I’d collected three specimens in separate baggies, hoping I’d gotten lucky and one of them was Carl’s. Burkett took all three back to his lab. I sat down to wait but instantly got antsy, got up, looked around.

  “How’s Elvis?”

  Julie nodded toward the sign on the wall. She hadn’t been bitten in nine days.

  Elvis chattered at me, pulling himself along the side of his cage with his beak. In the cage behind his, which I hadn’t noticed before, was a big gray parrot. It was sitting on a wide wooden platform instead of a round roost, like a dowel rod. I peered through the wire. The bird had no toes, just stumps at the end of its legs.

  “What happened to him?” I asked.

  “Her,” Julie said. “Nothing. She hatched that way.”

  “So it’s a birth defect?”

  “Yeah. Her parents were old.”

  There was a pink bird in a cage against the far wall. “Adopt me!” read a hand-lettered note attached to the frame. The sign said her name was Rosie, and she was a four-year-old rose-breasted cockatoo. I asked if her owner had died.

  “Rosie? No, they’re just giving her up.”

  “Why would someone go to all the trouble of getting a bright pink bird and then give it up?”

  “She ate something,” Julie said. “I don’t know what it was, but it won’t pass, and she needs twelve hundred dollars’ worth of surgery. So they’re hoping someone will adopt her.”

  “Oof. That’s a high-dollar bird.”

  I leafed through a bird magazine. A woman came in with her son, a boy about Emmett’s age, and a noisy rooster in a plastic bin. Burkett popped his head out, motioned for me to wait, turned to the woman with the rooster. “Come on back,” he said to her.

  Another thirty minutes passed. The woman and her son left with an empty bin. I could hear the rooster squawking in the back, an inpatient no
w. Then Burkett came out.

  “Well, good news, no parasites,” he said. “But in one of the samples, probably Carl’s, it’s got some budding yeast in it.”

  “Yeast? And that means?”

  Burkett drew in a breath, puffed it out. “All I can tell you right now,” he said, “is that it means his immune system isn’t working right. We’ll give him a full workup, see what’s going on.”

  “Okay. How do we do that?” I asked.

  Burkett hesitated, unsure of the question. It was, I had to admit, an odd use of the royal we, considering I wouldn’t be doing any of the working up. “Well, you bring him in, and I take X-rays and draw blood—”

  “See, that part right there, the ‘bring him in’ part. How do we do that?”

  “You catch him. Put him in something, like a feed bag, and bring him here. You have a feed bag?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’ve got that. I’ve just never done the catching.”

  Surely I couldn’t be the first person who didn’t know how to catch a peacock. Burkett smiled, nodded in recognition. He explained his preferred technique, which was to wait until dark, when Carl was roosting and couldn’t see as well, then sneak up from behind on a ladder. In a single, swift movement, I was supposed to get one arm around his body to pin his wings and, with my free hand, clamp his legs. Then I would back down the ladder in the dark with both arms occupied by a large, unhappy bird.

  That hung between us for a few seconds.

  “What are the odds of me getting hurt in all this?”

  “You’ll be fine,” he said. “As long as you’re fast. But, like, milliseconds fast.”

  “Uh-huh. And if I’m not?”

  “Oh. Well, pretty good, I guess. Black eye, probably. They can really get those wings swinging. Maybe a broken nose.”

  “What about the, you know, what do you call them, the talons?”

  Burkett drew in a breath and pulled his shoulders back, as if it hadn’t occurred to him that I might not be a gifted leg-grabber. “Yeah, those,” he said. “If he catches you with one of those, you’re gonna bleed.” Pause. “If he catches you good, you’re gonna bleed a lot.”

  I nodded. I assumed I would bleed a lot. “How about a net?”

  He seemed to be considering this for the first time in his career. “Yeah,” he said. “A net would work. I don’t see why not.”

  * * *

  Problem was, I didn’t have a net and wasn’t sure where to find one at six o’clock on a Friday evening. Maybe a sporting goods store. Or a fisherman. Did any of my friends fish? Uncle John! We call him Uncle John because he’s Emmett’s godfather. He fished. He fermented his own turmeric and roasted his own coffee beans and smoked anything that would fit in the barrel-shaped cooker on the patio, which was beside the point, but it meant he had a lot of useful accessories. He would have a net. Probably one of those big long-handled things, too, like for hauling in salmon or some other fish about the size of a peacock.

  I’d met John when we both moved to Durham, but I’d known his mother and father for years before that. John’s parents were Louise’s parents’ closest friends. Her father and his father were fishing buddies and hunting buddies and drinking buddies. John’s father was an Episcopal priest who married me and Louise, both of her sisters—one of them twice—and both of her parents, though not to each other. He baptized Calvin and Emmett, with those last two events accounting for the entirety of my church attendance in the last half of the aughts, a fact upon which John’s father never commented, hinted at, or alluded to. He also poured very dry and generous martinis. He was my kind of preacher.

  I called John from the parking lot of the Birdie Boutique and explained my dilemma. He didn’t have a fishing net, but he was pretty sure he had something in the basement. He kept me on the phone while he clomped down the stairs and rummaged around. “Got it,” he said. “Yeah, this should do it. Just let me get it off of here and I’ll bring it over.”

  I told him I’d pick it up, that I didn’t want to interrupt his Friday night any more than I already had.

  “I don’t mind. I want to see. Wait—do you want help?”

  “Oh, sweet Jesus, yes. Really?” To my initial surprise, our friends had shown no more than a passing interest in the peacocks. People would come over for drinks or dinner and stand outside the garbage coop for a few minutes, waiting for Mr. Pickle to do his peacock thing and throw up those feathers. He did not perform on command, however, and I hadn’t accounted for the fact that looking at someone else’s caged peacocks gets boring pretty quickly. It’s like sitting through a violin recital of eight-year-olds: Sure, it’s cute and all, but once your kid is done, the afternoon tends to drag a bit. “I’m a little scared someone’s gonna get hurt,” I told John. “Me or the bird. Probably me.”

  “Yeah, man, I’m on my way.” He was half laughing. “I’ve been telling the girls you should always go help people if they ask and if you can. Helping you catch a peacock is an excellent example.”

  * * *

  There was no handle on John’s net. He had it wadded up in his hand, a tangle of yellow nylon that he shook out with a couple quick snaps of his wrist. It opened into a square about four feet on each side, thin strings knotted together in a two-inch grid.

  “This gonna work?” John asked.

  “It’s gonna have to, I guess.” I’d hoped John would bring something I could use from a distance, not get within slashing range until Carl was contained. But this was a close-quarter net, the kind we’d have to drop on him. “Where’d you get that sad thing?”

  “I got it out of a soccer goal I made Julia.”

  “You cut up your daughter’s stuff to help me catch a sick bird? I’m touched. Yeah, we’ll make it work.”

  Ethel and Mr. Pickle scooted to the far side of the pen when we stepped in, but Carl stayed in his straw pile. We opened the net, John holding one end, me the other, and advanced on him slowly, trying not to spook him into bouncing off the chicken wire. He let us get within three feet before he stood up and backed away. We were probably just prolonging the whole thing: Carl moved at our pace, keeping a steady distance between himself and the net until we pushed him into the corner.

  Then he bounced off the chicken wire.

  It was a gentle bounce. Carl didn’t make his move until he was a step away from the edge of the pen. He couldn’t get any speed, and there was nowhere for him to go. We tossed the net over him, and I dropped to my knees and smothered him like a fumbled football. He flapped a wing free and I grabbed it, tucked it against his side. He was either too tired or too resigned to struggle after that. He was also remarkably soft, his chest almost silken. I’d never touched any of the peacocks before, except to unload them, and that was just feet and feed bags.

  “Well, that was easier than expected,” I said.

  I looked up over my shoulder at John. He had this expression, a look particular to him, a sort of awed smile just on the edge of laughter that suggested he’d discovered a very cool thing and would very much like to do, consume, or observe more of it. It was a look of reckless, confident optimism.

  “All right, man,” he said. “Now what?”

  Once I had a grip on Carl, John zip-tied his legs, then cut a hole in the top of an empty bag of Purina Game Bird Chow. I figured he was going to be in the sack for a while, maybe overnight, and would appreciate being able to stick his head out and look around. It didn’t occur to me that Danielle hadn’t mutilated her sacks for a reason: Once we maneuvered Carl into the bag and his head through the hole, he started wiggling, forcing his way out. The hole got too big, so John dumped a quarter-sack of Mule City chicken feed in Comet and Snowball’s pen so we could start over, only without the hole.

  We got Carl cinched into the Mule City bag, and then I realized I had no idea what to do next. Leaving him in a sack on the ground for the night wasn’t ideal, but neither was taking him into the house. I hadn’t thought this through. It was almost seven-thirty, ninety minutes past closing t
ime, but I called the Birdie Boutique anyway. Maybe the phone would forward to Burkett’s cell, I thought, and he could tell me what one does with a bagged-up bird until morning.

  Julie answered on the first ring. She has a voice engineered for the telephone, soothing and steady. Burkett was still there, she told me, and it would be best if we brought Carl in right away, let him get settled there so Burkett could start on him first thing the next day.

  I dropped off Carl not long after. Burkett took him to the back. “Water only,” I heard him tell an assistant. He returned to the front desk, asked me to bring food in the morning, and said he’d try to have some answers by nine.

  * * *

  Julie was unlocking the front door when I pulled in the next morning with a gallon baggie of bird chow. “Am I early?” I asked as I climbed the porch stairs.

  “Oh, no, he’s been here for hours,” she said. “Just because we’re not open doesn’t mean he’s not here.”

  I followed her in and could hear Burkett moving around in the back. I waited only a minute or two before he popped his head out and waved me into the room where I’d first met him in July. “I found a lot of the problem,” he said, clicking a mouse a couple of times until an X-ray lit up the computer screen.

  It was clearly an image of a bird on either his back or his stomach, legs splayed, wings outstretched, the same pose as the eagle on the back of a dollar bill. “All these white spots,” Burkett said, swirling the cursor around what appeared to be Carl’s stomach, “they shouldn’t be there. Those are all little pieces of metal.”