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of blue and rose. But the tail at rest, as beautiful as it is, can’t hold a feather to the spectacle of the full fan with its hundreds of shining eyes. A strutting peacock is a breath taking vision that broadcasts the magic of nature.
It isn’t just the male that struts. His dowdy mate spreads her tale, putting on a much less flashy vesion of the same show. Even the babies get into the act. “They start strutting when they're about a week old,” Hilt reported.
Pride Is Downfall
But the peacock’s pride can also be his downfall. “I bet you can't catch one,” Hitt wagered, explaining that the birds can take off straight up in the air with a helicopter’s verticle climb to reach the safety of a barn roof or tree branch when threatened by a hungry maurauder. “The only time mine have gotten caught has been when they got cornered in the shed where they couldn’t fly/But in India, where they come from, tigers can catch them by grabbing their tails and pulling them back down,” Hitt reported.
That fabulous tail is the single part of the bird that he has managed to touch since his peacocks were first hatched. "The only time I can put my hands on him is when he’s strutting his tail. He's watching the hen. so interested in her that he doesn’t pay any attention to me and I can walk right up and feel those feathers.”
According to Hitt, peacocks don’t deserve the bird brain description that so aptly fits the rest of the fowl world. “They’re very, very schrewd,”he reported. "A hen will fly away from her nest so you don’t see the direction she’s walking from. And after leaving her feed, she’ll walk in every which direction before going back. Once I looked three weeks just to find one nest and it was right next to the barn, within 20 feet of the fence row.”
Hitt gives his birds credit for having the highlv touted memory of an elenhani “They never forget,” he maintained. Several years ago, he recalled a neighborhood mutt cornered and killed one of his hens. Since then the rest of the flock zoom up to the barn roof every time their old enemy comes into view. At the same lime they disdainfully ignore any other visiting dog unless they’re chased.
Dignity Always
Even when they flee before an attacker, peacocks never
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