One morning, a peacock showed up! I looked out the window and there it was, wandering the yard near my garden. I couldn’t figure out how a peacock, of all possible things, had found its way to our rural enclave. When you think of the Olympic Peninsula, certainly bald eagles come to mind. Salmon, of course. And black bears at the higher elevations. But peafowl? Not likely. The whole thing was a mystery.
The morning of the bird’s arrival, it appeared to be completely at home, fearless as it wandered around unfazed by several deer feeding nearby. It seemed that both the deer and the peacock—what I soon figured out was a female, technically called a “peahen”—accepted each other as if this meeting between species was no big deal. Nothing to see here.
For the next few days, “Pearl,” as I named her for her white/gray coloring and iridescent neck feathers, took up residence, freely wandering our property as if she owned the place. I wondered about what she was eating, if anything, and soon learned that peafowl were not finicky eaters. In the wild they consumed just about anything—grass, berries, insects—whatever was convenient. Observing Pearl picking at grass and dirt, those facts seemed to hold up. But what was she doing here? Didn’t she want to go back to the comfortable farm and fellow peafowl she had fled? Or, was pecking the ground and resting for long stretches in the sunshine all that mattered to her?
When it got dark, she disappeared, I assumed into the woods where she found a place to sleep, likely up in a tree away from predators. This was a world I didn’t get a chance to observe. Though one afternoon, while walking in the woods, I noticed a hollowed out dirt patch where Pearl had apparently been “dusting” herself. Pearl had regular rituals that she did in private. Sleep. Dust. A daily toilette.
But in the daytime, she was never out of sight long. Several times, Pearl wandered up to the house and stood on the back porch looking through the windows with calm curiosity. She seemed comfortable around our cats and chickens, though she always moved slowly away when I got too close.
Over the years, I’d seen plenty of peacocks, the males, flaunt their dramatic blue plumage. Never a female. What did that look like?
One day I got my wish. I glanced out the window and there was Pearl, wandering the yard as usual, but this time with her tail feathers fanned out. She wasn’t gloriously colorful like her male counterparts. Gray and dull, in fact. But Pearl didn’t seem to care. She strutted her feathers like a boss.
That was the last time I saw her.
The next day she was gone. I figured she must have gone back to her people. Back to the place she really belonged.