Tag / Los Angeles

by Roslyn

Life imitates [filmmaking] art

Congratulations to Myra Burrell – her peacockumentary has been short-listed for the Animal Behavior Society’s film festival!

Myra, a veteran of the natural history film program at the University of Otago in New Zealand, traveled to California with me in 2010. She helped with peacock field work, capturing more females than anyone thought possible. Somehow, in the meantime, she made a movie about the birds. It’s a short film that gives you an idea about what happens on a peacock lek, from the hen’s point of view.

It’s quite an honour to be among the 6 films selected for festival screening, since they must get on the order of ~100 applicants. If Myra wins, it would be oddly fitting: a wildlife film straight out of a park that moonlights as a real Hollywood set.

You can watch “Hen’s Quest” here.

The best parts? I love the music and Myra’s cinematography. I contributed writing (including the title!) and did the artwork; Brian McGirr turned my map drawing into a fantastic animation. Good luck, Myra!

by Roslyn

How I learned to respect the peahen

Written for the Los Angeles Arboretum.

Meep meep? More like “Honk honk!”

Arboretum regulars will no doubt recognize the call of a startled peahen, but you may not be aware of the clever ways they use it. Not that they try to boast or taunt the enemy, necessarily, but I’m starting to think that the birds at the Arboretum owe a lot to their version of the Road Runner’s call.

How do I know? Some background is in order here: I’m the tall blond woman who has been hanging around the Arboretum morning and night for the past few years, overdressed and hauling a camera, a pair of binoculars, some peanuts and, if I was lucky, a peacock. Working at the park each spring, I often wished I had more time to chat with visitors. But I was preoccupied, and the life of an ornithologist can sometimes feel like that of Wile E. Coyote on a bad day.

For the past four years, I’ve been chasing peafowl across the continent – from Arcadia in February to Winnipeg, Toronto and New York in May and June. Incidentally, the Bronx Zoo is the only place in North America that even comes close to the Arboretum in sheer number of peafowl. Three years into my PhD in biology, and I’ve spent literally hundreds of hours watching these birds.

You may be wondering what got me into this mess.

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by Roslyn

Furious about eyespots

I think I flubbed an interview this week. My supervisor Bob and I just published a paper that is getting some press, because it addresses a recent controversy about the peacock’s train1. Eager for the interview with Nature News, I wasn’t exactly prepared with good lines for the reporter to go on – and I wonder if that’s why he had to pump up our story as a “furious debate”2.

In truth, most of the “debate” played out in a flurry of news articles back in 2008. That was when Mariko Takahashi and her colleagues in Tokyo and Kanagawa published the fruits of their exhaustive 7-year study of the peafowl at the Izu Cactus Park in Shizuoka, Japan3. I’ve never met Takahashi, although I did meet her supervisor and one other player in this story at a conference back then, and all were quite friendly. But the title of Takahashi’s 2008 paper, “Peahens do not prefer peacocks with more elaborate trains” was a direct jab at an earlier one, “Peahens prefer peacocks with more elaborate trains”, by Marion Petrie in the UK4. Takahashi and her coauthors had the difficult task of proving a negative – and they did it pretty convincingly, with the aid of a much more extensive data set than anyone had gathered before with this species. The upshot? For a peacock in Japan, having a bigger train ornament doesn’t necessarily win you any favours with the ladies.

Bigger in terms of the number of eyespots visible in the ornament during courtship, that is; males have about 150 on average, each on the end of a single feather. The results of the Japanese study were in direct contradiction to Marion Petrie’s earlier work as well as some recent studies of peafowl in France suggesting that eyespot number is often correlated with male mating success4,5. What’s more, in the 1990s Petrie had confirmed the causal effect of eyespots by showing that you could alter a male’s fate just by removing about 20 of them6.

Peacock in flight

Taken at the Los Angeles Arboretum in 2009. Photo by Roslyn Dakin.

The Japanese team proposed a rather bold new hypothesis. Perhaps the cumbersome, ridiculous train ornament is obsolete – a relic of sexual selection past, no longer used by females in quite the same way as it was when it first evolved3.

This was taken up with gusto by the news media. Check out the headlines: “Peacock feathers: That’s so last year”, “Have peacock tails lost their sexual allure?”, “Peacock feathers fail to impress the ladies”. Amusingly, this last article was also published with the title, “Female peacocks not impressed by male feathers” by Discovery News7-10. Males could probably be forgiven for striking out with those elusive female peacocks, since they don’t actually exist.

Headlines aside, Takahashi’s interpretation is somewhat of a concern. Here’s why: creationists picked up on this story too11.

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by Roslyn

To kill bias, gather good data

I hate myself for this: I have the worst sense of direction.

For the entire year when I was living in my first apartment in Kingston, I would take a circuitous route along King Street and then up Princess on my way home from the Kingston Yacht Club. Nearly two kilometers, when walking up West Street would have got me home in half the time. As Charlie said when I revealed this to him, “Two sides of a triangle is always greater than one.”

It’s not that I didn’t know grade school geometry, or that I wanted a more scenic route. I just stuck to the path I knew would get me there.

I felt a bit triumphant when I realized how long it can take Charlie when you ask him to pick up the milk. The last time I dragged him to the grocery store, I left him alone for a few minutes to use the bathroom, and returned to find him loading pineapple after pineapple after pineapple – painfully slowly, into the cart. We laughed, but I don’t ask him to come with me anymore. Alone, I can collect a week’s worth of food in less than 20 minutes.

I’m not ashamed to admit my navigational failings, either. My field assistant Myra and I happily agreed that our best strategy driving around Los Angeles was that we should always do the opposite of whatever we both thought was correct. It worked.

What I hate is my sneaking suspicion that I’m just a lame stereotype. Maybe I’m a terrible navigator because of biology; female brains are just not suited for getting around.

Hunter, gatherer

Modified from this cartoon. Original source unknown.

Recently, psychologists looked at this sex difference in what seemed like a neat field study of human foraging behaviour – in a grocery store1. Joshua New from Yale University, and his coauthors from UC Santa Barbara, set up a unique experiment in a California farmers’ market: they led men and women around the market, giving them samples like apples, fennel, almonds and honey. Then they brought the subjects back to a central location and asked them to point in the direction of those same food items.

These researchers wanted to test the idea that women outperform men at certain kinds of spatial tasks: while men are thought to be better at vector-based navigation, women might excel at remembering the locations of objects, because of the way foraging roles were divided up when our brains were evolving. It’s thought that in our hunter-gatherer past, big game hunting meant that men had to figure out how to bring heavy prey home by the most direct route. Women foraging closer to home needed a much different set of spatial adaptations2. It’s not that men are better at spatial reasoning in general, you just have to choose the right task3.

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by Roslyn

Science fictions

Fakery is not just for Hollywood films anymore.

Nature documentaries are full of it, from elegant narratives to some downright dirty tricks. This tradition goes back a long way: the myth that lemmings commit mass suicide to save their brethren from overpopulation was spread widely as as result of the 1958 Disney film White Wilderness. This is not trivial. The film won an Oscar for Best Documentary. The lemming story made it as far as a philosophy course I took in university (Science and Society PHIL203), where the instructor used it as an example of why we should doubt evolutionary explanations of human behaviour. The myth just won’t die, even though CBC exposed the lemming scam back in 19821. Journalists on The Fifth Estate proved that the mass suicide scene was actually filmed in downtown Calgary, not in the Arctic as Disney had claimed. The Disney crew used a rotating platform to push captive lemmings into the Bow River.

More recently, the BBC has come under fire for using captive animals to film some of the scenes in the Blue Planet series1. This seems justifiable to me, but some truly ugly practices have also been exposed, like baiting corpses with M&Ms to get footage for an IMAX documentary on wolves2.

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by Roslyn

Field biology goes to Hollywood

One of the weirder things about my field site is that it is also a Hollywood set. A number of movies, TV shows and commercials have been filmed at the LA Arboretum, going back to Tarzan Escapes in the 1930s.

The Arboretum had a regular appearance in the popular 1970s show Fantasy Island. In the opening credits, a midget rings the bell in the Queen Anne Cottage. This is a historic building on the Arboretum grounds that was built in the by the same wealthy California businessman who started the peafowl population in the area.

You can catch the Arboretum in many other films, since it provides a convenient stand in for the jungle a short drive away from downtown Los Angeles. Examples: The Lord of the Flies, Anaconda, The Lost World, Congo, Terminator 2, The African Queen, and too many campy horror flicks to count (Attack of the Giant Leeches?).

Several things were filmed during my three seasons there, leading me to realize that making a movie is a lot like doing field biology. Here’s how:

1. The hours. Field biologists often have to keep the same hours as their study species, working for as long as the animals are active. For some ornithologists, this can mean starting at 4 am. We were lucky with peafowl. They are late risers, coming down from their roosts around 7-8 am. They also tend to take a long siesta in the middle of the day. This meant that we had to work two shifts, coming in for several hours in the morning and returning after lunch until sunset. It made for some long days.

Film crews also seem to work long hours based on the amount of light, since our schedules would often coincide.

2. Tedium and futility. Most of the time spent watching animal behaviour is watching them do very little. Here’s an example: we saw about 20 mating events in 2010, in 500 man-hours of observation time. That’s over 24 hours of sitting quietly for each copulation.

Catching the beasts can be a little bit more active, but you still feel completely useless 90% of the time. Your main activities include: waiting for the animals to show up, looking for the ones you haven’t caught yet, waiting around for your traps to work, and worrying about all the reasons why they aren’t.

A lot of jobs in Hollywood might not be so far off. When AT&T filmed a commercial at the Arboretum last year, we met a guy whose sole responsibility was to keep the peacocks away from the set. His boss gave him a bag of bird seed. It was the cusp of the breeding season, and the crew had decided to place their set right in the middle of one particularly dedicated male’s territory. The poor guy was literally playing tag with that bird all day.

3. Costumes. Important in Hollywood, but also useful when trying to catch birds. After a few weeks in the field, most tend to settle in to a uniform, wearing the same thing nearly every day. If it works and you’ll just be getting dirty again tomorrow, why change?

Field clothes

Waterproof jackets come in handy when catching large birds. From left: Will Roberts, Myra Burrell and Roz Dakin. Photo by Bonny Chan.

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by Roslyn

Deep archives: The Californians, in pictures

Although I’m very happy to be back in Canada (having decided that Los Angeles is a terrible place to live, mostly because of all the driving), I have to admit that the people of California were quite friendly. I found the peafowl to be equally amenable. Since mating activity was finished during my last week in Los Angeles I decided to take some photographs of them (and other birds at the Arboretum, including the hummingbird in the border above). Here are a few of my favourites…

A peacock on the lawn: the male below manages to guard his territory while simultaneously resting in the shade. These birds can be surprisingly camouflaged at times.

Peacock on the lawn at the Los Angeles Arboretum

Other times, this is not the case:

Peacock perching among some pink flowers

A peahen on a nest: one of the first females to lay chose to do so in the sink of the men’s bathroom. This one appears to be more fortunate, but I wasn’t around long enough to see any peachicks.

Finding a nest

A female with Penelope: the model drew a lot of negative attention from the ladies. This picture was taken when I had Penelope stashed away in some bushes; after a lengthy inspection, the real female (on the left) started pecking at her aggressively.

I’ve been meaning to photograph peafowl in flight for at least a year, now, and I sat under a roosting tree for nearly two hours to get these last pictures. First, a peahen:

Peahen in flight

And, my favourite from the same morning: peacocks do it too!

Peacock in flight

by Roslyn

Deep archives: A working strategy

I am very excited to report that Penelope has finally lived up to her name!

Here she is right before being courted by male no. 30:

Setting up the model peahen for a displaying male

(Photo credit: Rob Ewart)

The secret to her success? You have to present her to males that are already (preemptively) inspired to display their tails. When you present her to a male that is resting on his territory, he just watches her curiously out of the corner of his eye while making himself look busy feeding and/or preening. But sometimes males will have their tails up when there aren’t any real females in the immediate area (either because they expect females to arrive very soon, or because some females have just left the area, or possibly because these males simply have the energy for it and nothing else is more pressing at the moment). Penelope’s best strategy is to target these males: when you initially approach them, they are slowly turning in circles as they keep a look out for their next female target. When you put Penelope in front of them, they enter into a pattern of dancing that is quite clearly directed towards the stuffed bird.

During one of the trials with male no. 30 (shortly after the picture above was taken), the peacock backed up alongside the model, shivered his train at her for an infinitesimal amount of time, and mounted her almost immediately for a mating attempt. Although initially shocked (and delighted) we soon remembered that we had to intervene, and certainly won’t let it happen again.

Update: Penelope was mounted two more times in California (bringing her total to three different males). I am with her now at the Bronx Zoo in New York City for some further experiments, and am determined to start writing here regularly again!

by Roslyn

Deep archives: Better than Gary Busey

They’re filming a movie on our field site right now. Apparently this isn’t out of the ordinary; one of the Jurassic Park movies and the climax from Anaconda were both shot at the Arboretum, for instance.

We’ve known this for some time, since a work crew has been gradually building a stadium on the main lawn of the Arboretum, on top of what is usually a large fountain (seems like a strange choice to me… fortunately, this area is not part of the lek so their activities won’t interfere with the peacocks). Rob found out a while ago that the stadium will be used for “a teen movie about cheerleaders”.

I learned some more details the other day. I was standing near the front gate, observing two peacocks that display on the roof of the Arboretum office building. Binoculars and notebook in hand, dressed ridiculously for the mild weather in a toque and heavy fleece, to most I would look like a crazy person taking notes about a roof. A woman approached me and struck up a conversation: apparently she was some sort of Hollywood production person on a scouting mission, and something about my appearance made her think that I was in production too. She was looking for a waterfall for a scene in an upcoming episode of Criminal Minds. She wanted to know if I was working on Fired Up, since she knew some people who were involved with it. I explained that I was actually watching the peacocks, secretly happy that I had found out the name of our cheerleading movie.

As soon as we got home, I searched for Fired Up on IMDB and learned that was a movie about “two guys who sign up for a cheerleaders’ camp in a desperate attempt to pick up girls”. And, as if this wasn’t ridiculous enough, it was billed as starring Patrick Swayze.

Our hopes of running in to the man who inspired the Patrick Swayze Express were dashed, though, a few days later. Rob had asked one of the set security guards about Swayze (and received a somewhat confused response); when we checked the IMDB site for Fired Up again, it had changed. The new site suggested that it’s most awesome (and sole recognizable) star had backed out – I think Rob’s questions might have even brought about the web update. But, as proof of how close we nearly came to Swayze, here is the old version of the site:

IMDB entry on "Fired Up"

by Roslyn

Deep archives: An instance of spite?

I have seen my first peafowl egg. Laid in the sink of the men’s bathroom, some of the Arboretum staff found it and brought it to me, unsure of what to do with it. The peafowl are overpopulated here and the staff are encouraged to find (and destroy) eggs. I ended up giving this one to Rob’s relatives from Palmdale in the hopes that they could hatch it (they keep chickens and have an incubator).

Perhaps in line with the fact that laying season is upon us, we’ve seen a few quite heated episodes involving the peahens in the last few days. Specifically, I’ve seen a couple instances of females being aggressive towards other females right in front of displaying (and preferred) males. Although this behaviour has been described before, it’s quite a paradoxical thing from the evolutionary point of view since female-female aggression over a presumably unlimited resource (mates) would be entirely spiteful.

I had seen the females in Winnipeg aggressively displaying their tails to each other in front of certain males a few times, but a recent episode here in Los Angeles has clarified the situation. This was, unmistakably, a female trying to prevent other females from mating with one of our top males. Here’s how it unfolded…

Male no. 30 was displaying his tail, with three females in the area: two sitting nearby in a little garden, preening away, and the third seeming to mirror the male while she aggressively displayed towards the preening females.

Peahen-peahen aggression

This went on for several minutes. Eventually, one of the preeners got up and left, and a few seconds later the aggressor lowered her tail and started walking away. Almost immediately, the second preener hopped down from her perch and accepted male 30’s advances right away. This brought the aggressive female literally running back to the scene, but it was too late for her to prevent the copulation. Luckily we managed to photograph the whole thing.

Peafowl copulation

Not sure what to make of it yet, but interestingly yesterday I saw more female-female aggression in front of another one of our favoured males. Our good intentions to work this morning were foiled by some light rain (peacocks don’t do anything when their trains are wet), but hopefully I’ll see some more of this action soon.

by Roslyn

Deep archives: Further notes from the field: deliberation, surprise and a misguided attempt

A few more things worth mentioning:

The other day we saw a female following a very interesting (and rather human-like) pattern while shopping around for a mate. She was visiting a particular male, and she’d watch him for a few moments (not always directly; it’s a good idea for females to seem as though they aren’t interested even when the are). She would start walking away and he would continue displaying; she’d make it about ten metres, stop, and then decide to go back. I watched this repeat about 4 or 5 times before she finally decided to accept that particular male. There weren’t any other males in the area that she would have been comparing on these forays, but it seemed pretty clear that something was going on in that pea-brain of hers. This is the first time I’ve noticed a female doing anything like this (at least in such an obvious way), but it’s possible that they could often make one or two of these little trips before making a decision.

Yesterday I saw one of the stickered males mate for the first time! It was one of the males with the decidedly less-conspicuous black stickers. I think this might actually be a good thing, since it means the females are at least considering the stickered males as potential mates.

And finally, I watched a peacock attempt (and manage) to mount one of the helmeted guineafowl that race around the park grounds. Hope for Penelope grows.

by Roslyn

Deep archives: Numbers, gathered

With our first two weeks of observations behind us, I thought I’d write about what we’ve gathered so far.

Fifteen copulations, all involving unstickered males: 6 for male 30, 5 for male 42, 3 for male 31, and 1 for male 38 (this last one is most triumphant since 38 is a male with stickers on the backs of his eyespots!). The remaining 16 males haven’t achieved anything yet, but that sort of skew (with the majority of males missing out on mating entirely) is normal for peafowl.

Two males display to a feeding peahen

Two males display to an uninterested female, while she feeds on some seeds provided by park visitors. Feeding the peafowl is not allowed.

Twelve attempts to touch the birds: okay, we haven’t really been counting (and if we had, this would probably outnumber the copulations). On a daily basis we scold people who try to touch and stroke the feathers of displaying peacocks. The offending demographic is about half children, half grown women; I feel a little bad about scolding the children, but grownups should know better.

Three soundbites: the most ridiculous one from a lady looking at a peacock with his train unfurled, overheard by Rob: “Now look at that and tell me there isn’t a creator!” Irreducibly beautiful indeed. The most astute comments have come from children: a couple of them exclaimed in surprise that the peacock feathers looked just like eyes, and today one boy asked, referring to the peacock’s crest feathers, “Why does he have a mohawk?”

One attempt by a juvenile male to mate with another juvenile male, and one attempt by an adult male to mate with a human female (not me). I think the former was a case of the juvenile males being eager to practice on anything, but I’m not sure about the latter.

And sadly, no Easter treats: yesterday was the “Great Easter Egg Hunt” at the Arboretum, and even though we thought we’d have an advantage over all the children since we’d be arriving when the treats were still being hidden, we failed to turn up anything. We also had to cut the morning short since all the commotion was impinging on lek activities.

As for Penelope, she’s staying in for now. Since there are real females about, I think a better use of our time is to get a handle on their preferences; I’ll bring Penelope out for round two in about a week or so.

by Roslyn

Deep archives: A discovery

I learned something exciting the other day: apparently the satellite view in Google Maps has enough resolution for me to map out the precise display territories of individual peacocks. What’s more, this is as true for Winnipeg as it is for Los Angeles.

Upon realizing this, I spent the afternoon obsessively gathering co-ordinates for the 39 peacocks I’ve come to know intimately over the past year, and then using them to work out the relative distances between the different male territories on each lek.

I thought I’d mention it here in case this turned out to be useful for anyone currently planning their field work – I guess the nice thing about my study species is that the habitat is open and surrounded by easily distinguished man-made things!

Anyways, I told Charlie how excited I was about this internet discovery, and happily, he understood.

ps. We went for a walk in the mountains north of Los Angeles (near Palmdale) the other day while visiting some more of Rob’s relatives, and it snowed! And then, a couple of hours later, it hailed! California is fantastic.

by Roslyn

Deep archives: The opportunists

Soon, the city will be mine and Vigo’s… mainly Vigo’s.

Elephant seals trace letters on the beach

My friend Adriana recently confessed to me that, while she was enjoying this site, she’d been “skimming over the science stuff no offense”. I would like to assure her that yes, we have taken advantage of our days off here as well.

Early on, we had the good fortune of having a few visitors descend on Los Angeles from across North America: Charlie from Kingston, and Shiva and Paula driving all the way from Texas for President’s Day weekend. We saw the Getty museum and then went out for a ridiculously tasty dinner in Beverly Hills that, for the 5 of us, cost nearly what I make in a month as a grad student. At the table next to us, we noticed the Ghostbusters II actor quoted above – Jess I expect you to get this one without internet cheating!

Last week Rob and I traveled to San Francisco for a couple of days. We had been working at catching birds for 11 days straight, since I thought it would make the most sense to exhaust ourselves with catching and then take an extended break, allowing the birds time to settle down before starting observations. Rob has family in Palo Alto just a short drive away from San Francisco, so we were very lucky to have warm beds and delicious meals provided. We spent one day visiting the Monterey Aquarium (an amazing place) and one day getting a taste of San Francisco (quite literally – we visited Golden Gate Park and went for clam chowder at the waterfront before heading home). San Francisco is a beautiful city. We drove around some of the residential areas, and the houses have a lot of ingenious ways of dealing with the steep hills. I’m going to go there for another short visit on my way home to Canada in April – hopefully I’ll have more time to explore!

My favourite travel adventures seem to happen when you don’t have any expectations, and Rob and I found some of this kind of adventure on our way to San Francisco. We followed the winding route along the coastline on the way there, and happened upon a bunch of basking elephant seals on one of the beaches we passed (we only stopped because Rob was wondering what everyone else had pulled over for). Male elephant seals are 2-3 times the size of females. During the winter, they gather on the beach and fight violently over their harems. Unfortunately we were a few weeks too late to see the breeding activity: the harems were mostly rolling around, scratching themselves, yawning and tossing sand on their backs (as well as moulting and nursing a few pups, I guess). But they were still quite amazing creatures, and I was shocked at how close we were able to get (don’t worry – we kept to the path that had been marked out by an outfit called “Friends of the Elephant Seals”). The picture above is of some elephant seal wanderings, and here is one of a harem:

Elephant seal harems on the beach

by Roslyn

Deep archives: I get my hands dirty

One thing I’ve felt a little bad about here is the amount of shit, literally, that my field assistant Rob has had to deal with. He’s the one who has to hold each peacock still in his lap for about an hour while I carefully measure and apply stickers to all of their tail feathers, and he takes a hit whenever the peacocks do what any reasonable animal would do when restrained by a giant predator. And these hits happen frequently.

I realize that this kind of mess is all just part of field biology (and I tried to give Rob some advance warning to this effect). However, it’s one thing to talk about it and another thing entirely to be on the receiving end. I hope Rob was happy today when we came across a little mystery in the park that had me get my hands a little dirty as well – the mangled remains of a peacock tail, the first direct evidence of peacock predation that I’ve ever seen

The specimen had a few eyespot feathers and the longest train feathers intact, along with some of the golden-coloured lower back feathers and (brace yourself) the last few fleshy vertebrae. I dutifully checked through the train to make sure that it was not one of our banded males (we sample the longest 5 train feathers from all of them, so if this was a banded male I would have found evidence of this), and then I took all of the eyespot feathers I could find. This afternoon, I returned to the scene after realizing that I could measure the length of the tail as well. A quick check of the tape measure (101 cm) confirmed that this was definitely not one of our banded birds (all had tails well over 115 cm).

Some peacock forensics

Biology nerds might also be interested to know that the most of the eyespot feathers were missing from the tail (only the very longest and very shortest feathers were there). My guess is that the others were lost in the struggle, evidence that this bird may have indeed been caught by the tail.

by Roslyn

Deep archives: Lek in flux

The peacocks here are fickle.

Just when we think the good stuff is about to begin, we’ll have a day where all they want to do is sleep and eat. And it doesn’t seem to be based on the weather (at least not in any simple way), since the activity level has waxed and waned over the past week despite consistently warm clear days.

The one thing we’re sure of is this: we arrived here just on the cusp of the breeding season (more or less perfect timing, although possibly a little too early). We didn’t see any males display their trains our first day, but as time wore on we saw a few opportunistic male dances (despite a lack of female interest). About a week in, we started to hear a lot more calling by males in the morning, and we saw a few more displays and a little male-male aggression. It seemed as though males were starting to establish their territories. Each morning, we’d notice them spreading a little further away from the ideal habitat around the park entrance and cafe.

One morning this week we saw five males positioned strategically around the outskirts of a the big lawn to the north of the cafe, stationary but neither feeding nor resting (which certainly suggests territorial behaviour to me). The next day, a handful of new males had spread into the staff parking lot where we process captured birds. When we brought our first catch of the day back into the shady corner of the lot for processing, one of these new males started following us. A beggar, we initially thought, until he actually started trying to attack the bird Rob had in hand. Apparently the sight of male plumage is enough to provoke an attack even if it’s suspended above the ground under the arm of a giant! We’ve solved this problem by moving our sampling station and by having me chase away the odd interrupting bird (which sometimes ends in both of us running in circles).

Most recently, we are starting to see a few males in regular territories but we still can’t tell what is going on with the bulk of them. Our strategy is to put all of our efforts into catching until the middle of next week. Then, we’ll head to San Francisco for a couple of days off and hope that things will settle down by the time we get back!

by Roslyn

Deep archives: Let’s enjoy a wonder time

It’s hard to believe I’ve been in Los Angeles for two weeks now. Time flies when you’re trying to outsmart wily peafowl.

The best way to describe my experiences here so far would be (consistent with my history): extremely lucky. Last fall I had managed to find a furnished room for rent at a ridiculously low rate just a couple of miles from the Arboretum, but had no idea what to expect since my contact with the landlord was limited to email. When Rob and I arrived in town two weeks ago, directions in hand, we drove past a number of elaborate looking houses on the way to our rental accommodations. As we passed gated lawns adorned with fountains and statues with our destination just blocks away we were getting quite excited.

Our house, it turns out, is rather modest for the neighbourhood. Our landlord, Shih, teaches math at a local high school. She is, as Rob describes, an alarm-system enthusiast and also a collector of old newspapers and other bizarre items that fill every available cupboard and surface in our bedroom. Luckily for us she is also quite a wonderful lady; she’s fed us several times, given us gifts of crackers and towels and even granted Rob responsibility for household affairs when she went away for a few days last week.

Huge cycad in the prehistoric forests of the Los Angeles Arboretum

Our luck continued as we started our first day of work at the Los Angeles Arboretum – it may be the most idyllic place to work on peafowl conceivable. The park is full of interesting gardens and trees of exotic proportions, including some positively prehistoric looking cycads, a bamboo forest full of hidden treasures, and an orange grove (and I can assure you that the fruit is delicious). Visitors are encouraged to venture away from the paths, and when you do you often come across park benches nestled in shady out-of-the-way places that you wouldn’t have noticed otherwise. It is exactly the kind of place where I would love to bring a book and spend the entire day reading outside.

We also saw a great deal of peafowl the first day at the Arboretum- and learned from the park director that these birds are descended from two pairs imported into the area by Arcadia’s founder (J. ‘Lucky’ Baldwin) a century ago. The population has grown to over 200 and is now spread throughout the residential neighbourhoods surrounding the Arboretum. While the birds apparently range quite widely for most of the year, they descend upon the Arboretum at the start of every breeding season (which, as it turns out, is exactly now) as it provides a safe-haven for lekking.

Driving around Arcadia, you can’t help but notice evidence of peafowl as the official city mascot everywhere – from the stylized peacock that adorns all of the Arcadia street signs and the small park next door to our house, to the logos for the Arcadia chamber of commerce and golf course, to the giant peacock fountain in the large central city park, to (most hilariously) a massive peacock stained glass window over the door of one Arcadia mansion.

We spent some time exploring the residential neighbourhoods around the park, and saw plenty of peafowl lazing on the well-groomed lawns and idly crossing the streets (Arcadia has even published a pamphlet explaining how to live in harmony with these beasts, here). Unfortunately, we can’t access the suburban birds for sampling because feeding and catching peafowl is prohibited under Arcadia bylaws. However, we’ve been granted free reign of the birds on the private park property, and I’ll write more about our efforts with them soon!