Why Peacocks?

by Sean Flynn

  They were completely protected from predators, and yet I’d defeated the reason for having them at all. It’s like the tree that falls in the forest: Is a peacock still magnificent if he can’t be admired from outside the garbage coop?

  * * *

  I slept restlessly for a week after the chickens died, waking up convinced I heard the fox clawing at the peacock pen. But I never saw it again. Ethel honked only at squirrels and cats. The fox had cleaned out the easy treats and moved on.

  One of us would find a barred feather every so often, stuck in a bush or hiding in the tall grass. The pile Emmett had laid in front of the tombstone lingered a surprisingly long time, a few of them pelted into the soil by hard rains. The last ones didn’t blow away until the middle of April, by which time we’d all gotten used to not having to secure Comet and Snowball for the night.

  Emmett didn’t mention them again for several months, not until the end of June, Tater’s birthday. Birthdays have always been an event at our house. There is a special crown and a banner and crepe ribbons strung in an exacting way from the dining room light to the doorjambs, and for the boys, Louise makes oversize and elaborate birthday cards covered with photographs from the previous year and a poem inside. They’ve saved every one. Tater’s party was less fanciful, marked only with an extra treat and a new stuffed bear—he’s a dog—and a tiramisu cake for the people. We sang “Happy Birthday,” which seemed to both please and confuse him.

  “Congratulations, Tater,” Emmett said when the song was over. “You’re the first pet that’s made it a whole year.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Danny Potente slipped up beside me before I saw him coming, stood close, and spoke softly. “They in your blood?”

  I gave him a quizzical look, fairly certain I’d never been asked that question before. We were standing near the doorway of a narrow beige-walled conference room on the first floor of the Four Points by Sheraton near the Kansas City airport. “I have no idea, Danny,” I said. “What’s supposed to be in my blood?”

  Danny never broke eye contact. “C’mon, you know.” He had a sly, vaguely conspiratorial smile. “The peacocks.”

  Over Danny’s shoulder was a rack of sweatshirts and hoodies screened with the logo of the United Peafowl Association, the initials UPA in a tall, thin font with a peacock perched in the loop of the P, his train flowing past the base of the letters. Danny was the president of the UPA, which is sort of the peafowl equivalent of the American Kennel Club, except exponentially smaller.

  “Um, no,” I said. “Not in the blood.”

  “Oh, it’ll happen. Just you wait.” Danny was in his early sixties, with a mustache and swept-back black hair that was just beginning to thin. I’d called him a few weeks earlier but was still getting used to his accent, purebred New York, none of the gilded lilt one might expect for a fancier of extravagant birds. On the call, we’d patched in Loretta Smith, the vice president. With the two of them, I was trying to figure out how to salvage my peacock situation, three birds whom I couldn’t let out but couldn’t admire from the outside of their cage, either.

  Neither one had much of an answer. Loretta paraphrased Winston Churchill, who paraphrased Sir John Lubbock, talking about a horse. “There’s something about the outside of these birds,” she said, “that’s good for the inside of me.” Well, yeah, that had been the original idea, before Carl got sick and the chickens got killed and I could see Mr. Pickle without going in the pen. But now what?

  The UPA’s annual convention was coming up, the twenty-fifth, so I signed up as a dues-paying member and booked a room at the Four Points. I’d never been to any kind of a convention, but they’d seemed like good places to learn things.

  “How many you got again?” Danny asked.

  “Three. Two boys and a girl.”

  “Oh, that’s not good. You gotta get more hens.”

  Danny is a salesman. He’s the CFO of a company he founded that designs and installs art and mirrors for hotels and hospitals—those pictures in all the rooms at the Radisson gotta come from somewhere—but he started as a salesman. Mass-produced art, mostly, and door-to-door from the trunk of his car. Old school. The key was getting whatever he was selling into the hands of the person he wanted to be a paying customer, have him or her hold it, trick the brain into a false sense of ownership. There must be a birthday coming up, he’d mention offhandedly, an anniversary maybe, and you know, this piece would look beautiful over that couch, don’t you think?

  Danny wasn’t selling me birds, just the idea of them.

  “I’m gonna take a hard pass on that, Danny. Three’s enough. Maybe too many.”

  “No, no, no. Three? That’s not too many.”

  “How many do you have?” Loretta had lowballed her birds at five hundred, but she was a breeder on a big spread in semi-rural Ohio. Danny was on Long Island.

  “I’d have to count,” he said. “A lot. I got all kinds. Ducks, chickens, pheasants, peacocks. I’m telling you, it’s in my blood. My father had birds, his father had birds, his father had birds—”

  “Wait, you don’t know how many you have?” I said. This was suspect. “Where do you keep so many birds you can’t even count them?”

  Danny looked in the lobby and glanced back into the room, as if checking to see who was in earshot. “I free-range most of ’em,” he said. “I got places.”

  “Places?”

  “Yeah, you know, places. If one place becomes a problem, I go to another place. I know people.”

  “A problem?” I’d stumbled into the underbelly of the peacock world.

  “Yeah, you know, sometimes there can be problems and—You know what? Forget about it. Doesn’t matter.” He did another head check, which I realized was less about who might be listening than whom he should be greeting, being the president and all. “You need more birds,” he said.

  “No. I really don’t.”

  “Heh. You wait. This time next year, you’ll have fifty. I’m telling you, they get in your blood.”

  * * *

  The United Peafowl Association, not surprisingly, is a niche organization. At the time, which was 2018, there were 223 members scattered from Florida to Texas to North Dakota, plus eight more overseas in places like Belgium and Thailand. For an outfit dedicated to the world’s most ostentatious bird, there is very little glamour and no pretension; the UPA is like Linus’s pumpkin patch, all sincerity. Even the milestone twenty-fifth annual convention was an unassuming, almost cozy affair: There were only thirty or so of us in attendance, and the banquet dinner was the early bird at a Golden Corral near the Four Points.

  The members who traveled to Kansas City were a mix of hobbyists like me, serious breeders of varying degree, and what would fairly be called enthusiasts, people who simply like peacocks and peacock-related things, of which there is an astonishing assortment. The peacock print and the peacock shape and the peacock’s colors can be applied to most consumer products and solid surfaces. The conference room at the Four Points was ringed with folding tables covered in black cloth displaying items to be auctioned later. There were peacock umbrellas and place mats and napkins and bookends and notebooks and wrapping paper and wind chimes and brooches and a yellow diamond-shaped sign that said “Peacock Crossing” and pencil holders and ornaments and many framed prints.

  I spent the better part of a half hour taking it all in, and thought of a woman I’d met in California, where the peacock killer was still at large. Cat Spydell took in abandoned and wounded animals on what she called the Pixie Dust Ranch but was really just the yard sloping down from her house in Palos Verdes. One of her rescues is a peacock she raised from a chick. She named him Radagast, after the Tolkien character, and Rad for short, and she took him to schools and festivals and such, like an educational ambassador on behalf of peacocks everywhere. One of the side benefits of having a peacock, Cat said, is that he was more glamorous than Lily the potbellied pig, who used to be her most famous rescue. “You know what happened
? Everyone gave me pig things,” she told me. “Pig earrings and pig mugs and pig key chains—they’re all pigs.” She let the pig-ness settle for a moment. “Now people give me peacock things. I don’t think you can have too many peacock things.”

  I don’t know, I thought, looking at the peacock necktie between the peacock wind chimes and the peacock earrings. There might be a limit.

  But I wasn’t there for the tchotchkes. I was there to learn, to gather practical knowledge from people who actually understood these birds. The morning of the first full day, right after breakfast, there was a seminar on how to examine fecal samples for parasites, with both microscopes and poop provided, so it was hands-on. That would have been a necessary and unpleasant skill if I didn’t have Burkett nearby. In the afternoon, a breeder gave a presentation on green peacocks, which to some people’s taste are prettier, more exotic, than the India blues. Because greens are so cold-sensitive, though, they’re often bred with blues to put some of the former’s tropical elegance into the latter’s climatic sturdiness. The hybrid is called a Spalding, named for the woman who first crossed them.

  “Who’s that?” I whispered to Danny.

  “Who? Spalding? The woman who first bred them. He just said that.”

  “Yeah, but who was she?”

  Danny shrugged. So did everyone else I asked.

  Danny was supposed to give a presentation on how to free-range birds. His places, it turned out, are all legitimate—the railroad tracks behind his office, a restaurant that invited him to leave some birds, an industrial area that doesn’t mind, a big fenced lot the owners said he could use, a friend’s aviaries. His accent just made it sound sketchy, like something out of a weirder Scorsese movie. But he got distracted by feral cats. “Killing machines,” he calls them. Millions of cats kill billions of birds every year. He went on like that for a while and never did get back to free-ranging.

  That evening, Twain Lockhart led his presentation on peafowl nutrition with a blank slide. Twain, a poultry consultant at the big feed company Nutrena, had a bushy beard and a blue ball cap, and I believed it was entirely possible he’d driven a tractor to Kansas City. He also brought a bag of little candy bars to toss out, ostensibly as a reward for answering questions, but the whole thing was more randomly jolly than that. With the blank slide behind him, he spread his arms for effect. “Here’s all the data we have on peafowl, folks,” which clearly was none. Twain was there to explain why there is no dedicated peafowl feed, which was a matter of basic economics. At any given time, there are approximately twenty-three billion chickens on the planet, almost all of which are white leghorns or a close relation thereof, laying in the commercial egg industry, or varieties of Cornish Cross living short, horrid lives on commercial farms. “Eight weeks, beginning to end,” Twain said. “Fifty-six days from hatch to the freezer.”

  Comet and Snowball had a hell of a life.

  Those billions of birds are the ones the feed companies care about, the ones making up ninety-five-plus percent of the market. Turkeys, forty-six million of which are eaten at Thanksgiving alone, get their own feed, and there are enough pheasants raised for hunting and eating and showing to justify a specialty feed. Peacocks are counted only by the thousands, or they would be if anyone took the trouble to count. “You’ve got a ways to go before the feed companies are gonna take an interest in peafowl,” Twain said. “The PhDs [who formulate the feeds] say they’re just fancy chickens. Big fancy chickens.”

  A few heads shook slowly, and there was a general titter of disappointment.

  * * *

  Most people are familiar with only one kind of peacock, the India blue. Maybe they’ve seen a white one, but that was probably a leucistic India blue. In any case, the peacock’s palette, to the layperson or even the owner of three birds, is somewhat limited.

  That apparently was a failure of my imagination: The UPA recognizes 225 varieties of peafowl. Not species—there are still only three, blue, green, and Congo; no one is reordering the animal kingdom—but genetic mutants that have been crossbred and rebred to create thirteen colors and five patterns, such as silver pied and white-eyed, which is when the eyespots in the feathers are white. And that’s just by UPA’s current count. In 2017, seven new colors were presented for the UPA’s consideration by Legg’s Peafowl Farm in Kansas City. It’s about thirteen miles from the Four Points and the main reason the convention was in Missouri: Brad Legg, who’s been in the business more than fifty years and is pretty much a legend in the field, was opening up his farm for a day, and peafowl fanciers wanted to see the new colors and all of the old ones, too.

  Old is a relative term. The first three mutations—black shoulder, white, and pied—were all documented in the eighteen hundreds. (They surely had appeared before then, but nobody wrote it down.) The next variety didn’t show up until the late nineteen sixties, a brownish bird hatched in Maine and originally referred to as a silver dun before the name was changed to cameo. The tricky part isn’t finding mutants so much as getting them to breed true—that is, making sure a bird with a silver dun mutation in its genetic code is capable of producing new silver dun chicks. That process typically involves generations of deliberate breeding, much of it with mothers and sons and fathers and daughters but not so much that the offspring end up hobbled by that same inbreeding.

  Twenty years after the cameo was stabilized, breeders started locking down other mutations. Charcoal, bronze, and white-eyed were all introduced in the eighties. The first purple was hatched on an Arizona farm in 1987, and opal and silver pied were bred in the nineties. Peach came from a multigenerational breeding of purples and cameos. Brad Legg found a midnight bird at an exotic bird sale in 1998, jade at another sale in 2000, hatched taupe from a purple hen and a plain India blue male in 2005, and found a steel bird at an animal swap meet in 2010.

  Once the patterns are crossed with the colors, the combinations multiply exponentially. The genetic leaps are relatively short from an opal pied to an opal black-shoulder pied to an opal black-shoulder pied white-eyed.

  Why anyone would want to make those genetic leaps at first struck me as odd, borderline obsessive, even. Peacock and peahen breeding is a precision exercise at this level, requiring copious and detailed records of which eggs came from which cock and hen combo and which eggs those cocks and hens hatched from to begin with, and so on back through the generations. Yet there will never be a substantial market for opal black-shoulder pied white-eyed peacocks. There are only so many people with the space and the patience for birds whose sole purpose is to be pretty, and fewer still who want an even more exotic version.

  But so what? There are enough collectors, enough fellow breeders. And how is it any different than, say, breeding dogs for certain characteristics, like bug eyes and smashed face? The genetic gap between Tater and a German shepherd is vanishingly small, too.

  And to be the first person to breed that opal black-shoulder pied white-eye? In the peacock world, that’s a triumphant achievement. It doesn’t matter if nonenthusiasts don’t get it. Journalists give each other awards all the time that mean absolutely nothing to anyone outside the business. So do Realtors and accountants. I’ve got a friend who spends his weekends racing junker cars and another who hunts mushrooms. Everyone’s got their thing.

  Opals and cameos were not my thing.

  “Not a lot of blue here, Danny,” I said. It was damp, overcast, the ground muddy from a week of rain. We were standing next to a pen of birds of a new color, Montana. Legg gave them that name because he drove all the way to Montana to get the first one and because it was the color of high-plains grasses.

  “Yeah, but that’s a beautiful bird,” Danny said.

  “It is, it is. It just doesn’t look like a peacock. Most of these colors aren’t really, you know, colors.”

  “Get outta here. Of course they’re colors. Did you see the platinum?”

  “I did, I did. Gorgeous. Not a peacock color.”

  He gave me a sideways look.
“You don’t like the pastels?”

  “Is that what you call them? Not sure I’d call ivory or mocha a pastel. And charcoal? That’s just a black-and-white bird. Like all the peacock got bred out of it except for the feathers.”

  “Oh, c’mon. These are gorgeous.”

  I thought just then of a line from a Flannery O’Connor novella called “The Displaced Person,” wherein a peacock is a sort of moral litmus test. One either saw in a peacock “a tail full of suns,” she wrote, or one was Mrs. Shortley, who saw “nothing but a peachicken.”

  That’s why Danny was the president of the UPA and why I had three peacocks hidden away in a garbage cage. Compared to him, I was Mrs. Shortley. He saw suns I could not. The birds were in his blood, he’d said, and I understood what he meant.

  I looked down a long stretch of runs and caught not a single glint of blue. But no one else seemed to mind. They were enthralled with these new mutations, redecorated and toned down by very determined and patient mortals. A few varieties, like steel, appeared more sophisticated, reserved, as if perhaps they were dressed for court. The rest, to my eye, looked either washed out or too dark. But maybe there was something I couldn’t see. I was clearly in a minority. Peacock aficionados appreciate a finely crafted novelty.

  I remembered something Twain Lockhart had said the night before. The peacock industry would need another fifty years or so to catch up with pheasants and build a market large enough to get the attention of the feed companies. But how? Pheasants are bred for commercially viable reasons, mostly to be hunted or slaughtered, but reasons nonetheless. Peacocks are bred to be looked at, but only in limited circumstances. There are no peacock shows, no peacock competitions. There’s no market to develop because there aren’t enough people with the interest, space, and tolerance for noise and poop to sustain anything more than a niche.