The Case of the Missing Peacock

 

I stumbled into The Case of the Missing Peacock quite by accident. I was minding my own business, pulling weeds in my garden when I suddenly felt a pair of eyes watching me. I looked about warily. Standing but three feet distant was a large peacock carefully eyeing me as if to inquire my business in the garden. Neither of us moved. Since I am not fluent in Peacock and the bird seemed equally inhibited in English, we simply stared. I was in my weed pulling posture, while he, in the best tradition of his regal parentage, proudly stood erect, the better to show off his royal blue feathers and the multi-colored finery of his elaborate tail. If you think I was surprised to see a large, ornate bird standing next to me in one of my gardens, you would be correct. I had seen peacocks before, but only in hot-weather preserves, mostly in Florida where I presumed they were wild. What was he doing in my yard?

 

I stood erect and moved ever so slightly in his direction. He seemed to take umbrage at my boldness; he strutted away until he was out of the garden and into my lawn. I waited a moment longer – he lost interest in me and resumed his search for bugs. He seemed to be having excellent luck as he pecked the ground and raised his head in a single motion, swallowing one bug after another every moment or two. I hopscotched from the garden into the house to alert Marjorie and test her intelligence on the matter. She had about the same knowledge and experience with big birds as me- virtually none We watched out the window as the big bird paced around our yard, pecking the grass at regular intervals. He seemed perfectly at ease.

When I got out of bed the next morning, I went to the window to check on our new visitor that I had taken to calling Charley. Charley wasn’t anywhere around the yard. We were both disappointed and somewhat sad. In a single day, Charley had captured our hearts with his regal coat of feathers and erect posture as he cleaned our lawn of those nuisance bugs. Now that he was missing, we worried that maybe a hungry fox or the badger we had seen, had caught him unawares while he was sleeping. It wouldn’t be the first time that we had seen bones and a pile of feathers on the path leading to the river. Around noon, the world changed; Charley was back, oblivious to our concerns as he resumed his bug search among the weeds and sparse grass that we call our lawn.

This was the circumstance for the next few days. Charley seemed happy, and we were happy watching him. He didn’t seem to mind our coming and going so long as we didn’t try to come too close. He continued his practice of disappearing each afternoon, only to reappear in late morning the following day. We worried about his absences, “What if he belongs to a neighbor child who is desperately searching for him?” And then Marjorie remembered – we had a neighbor some years back who had a large fenced pen in his back yard from which strange noises emanated. One day we investigated and determined that the source of the noise was one or more large birds, presumably peacocks. Maybe Charley was a descendant of one of those birds, searching for his parents … Maybe Charley was searching for a long-lost sibling from that flock … Maybe he was a lost pet … Maybe …, Well, that’s too many maybe’s. Like it or not, Charley had developed into a pet who seemed happy vacuuming our lawn.

Although we continued to worry about Charley’s regular absences, the novelty of having a large bird hanging around our lawn began to wear off. That, and my discovery of great gobs of bird poop on our sidewalks, made Charley seem a little less welcome. We began calling neighbors to learn if anyone had a missing bird and we debated about calling Animal Control. These considerations ended when a work crew suddenly appeared – those painters that we had contracted with some months earlier for painting our house. Charley seemed to take their presence in stride as he dodged their ladders, tarps and tools during his lawn work.

At the end of a week the painters had finished the painting job. As I paid the foreman, I asked if Charlie had been a nuisance during their work. “Not really,” he said, “and we learned a lot about Charley.” When I asked what they had learned, they said that the most important thing was that Charley’s favorite food was Dorritos. The painting crew was driving away before it struck me; They had been feeding Charley all week. It was no wonder the missing peacock had remained, given our endless supply of bugs and the painting crew’s supply of food from leftover lunches along with Dorritos for desert!

After the painters left, Charley became more of a bother and his droppings seemed to grow in size and number. (I should mention the old truism that little birds have little white droppings but big birds like Charley leave huge helpings of dinner-plate size poo.) The final straw was my finding of a dinner plate dollop of Charley do-do on our newly painted deck. Charley had roosted overnight on a log just above the deck. When I saw him in the morning, he was in no hurry to leave until I threatened him with a broom and he responded by slowly lifting off the log with his large wings fanning my face.

In a desperate effort, Marjorie made a telephone call to the owner of Cindy Lou’s Zoo. ’Why yes, the zoo would be willing to give Charley a new home and by the way, Charley might like the pea hen that already lived at the zoo. We made the necessary arrangements. Charlie is no longer a missing peacock. We plan to stop by the zoo sometime to visit him and his new mate. Maybe we should take him a plate of bugs.