Tag / peacock

by Roslyn

SICB Portland

Here is the poster we presented at SICB Portland last week on the biomechanics of peacock displays (click to enlarge):

SICB poster

I think it turned out pretty well, although I’m not sure it could stand alone without an interpreter.

We had a constant stream of awesome visitors. My coauthor Suzanne brought feathers and a model peacock to demonstrate what we were talking about – brilliant! We also had a touchscreen mounted to the left of the poster to display the supplemental videos, but to my surprise we didn’t use it much. It was too slow to load for every new visitor, although it did come in handy for people who wanted an in-depth look. I realize now that videos should really be integrated spatially with the poster content. This could be done if whole display was a touchscreen, for example.

One of the highlights of the meeting was seeing how folks in Stacey Combes’ lab are tracking the movements of individual bees by gluing tiny QR codes onto the bees’ backs (the codes are automatically recognized on video of the bees entering and exiting their hives by tracking software). Another highlight was Ken Dial’s talk about the influence of predation on the development of flight in nestling birds. Portland had lots of good food and drink and exciting views of 1000s of crows roosting late at night downtown.

Thanks to Owen, Suzanne, Jim and Bob for such a fun project!

by Roslyn

Feel the vibration

In between field work, I’ve been making a lot of videos lately – mostly for my students in the summer course in Ecology and the Environment. But my latest creation is entirely different: it’s for the upcoming American Ornithologists’ Union (read: bird nerd) conference.

It features slow-motion clips of peacocks vibrating their train feathers during their courtship displays. I used a special high-speed camera to film this behaviour at 210 frames per second – it was incredibly difficult to do, because the high-speed camera requires that you get really close, and males only perform the vibration when a female is nearby (and not a human one!). In the end, I was able to coax some hungry peahens practically into my lap by slowly doling out the treats. This allowed me to film males displaying at the females from just a couple of feet away.

From these videos, I estimated that peacocks vibrate their eyespot feathers at a rate of 25 Hz (i.e., the feathers move back and forth a whopping 25 times each second). That’s incredibly fast, but it’s hardly record breaking for birds. For instance, Teresa Feo and Chris Clark recently showed that hummingbirds vibrate their tail feathers at a rate of more than 80 Hz to produce a buzzy trill-like sound during their display dives. However, the hummingbirds do it passively, I believe.

Other birds are also making the news these days for their choreographic skills. Anastasia Dalziell and her coauthors at the Australian National University have shown that superb lyrebirds actually coordinate song and dance during their remarkable courtship displays.

Further Reading

  1. Feo and Clark. 2010. The Auk 127: 787-796.
  2. Dalziell et al. 2013. Current Biology. In press.
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

Elections are like peacocks

Both are loud, and both cause colourful flashy things to pop up on lawns everywhere. And much like elections, the peacock’s train is a costly endeavour. The species might be better off in terms of survival and abundance if they could just do away with those feathers. In terms of sheer waste, they remind me of the Green party pamphlets in our apartment building entrance way. They were stuffed blindly into all of the available mailboxes – which happen to be for street level businesses on our downtown block, not residents. Nice.

Peacocks and elections are both supposed to experience strong positive feedback effects. In politics, momentum can lead to rapid climbs in popularity. Sexual selection can be similar: as Ronald A. Fisher pointed out, exaggerated male traits can potentially evolve through a process of positive feedback. If enough females prefer the particular male trait initially, and the next generation inherits both the female preference and the exaggerated male trait, it can kick-start a runaway process of sexual selection to extremes.

Despite claims to the contrary, we don’t actually know whether Fisher’s runaway process contributed to peacock evolution. But it may be reasonable to assume that it played at least some role: positive feedback should set up easily so long as mate choice is not very costly for females2.

Thinking about peacocks gave me an insight that may have cured my allergy to all things political, at least temporarily. Not that I don’t care about the election – I do – but I can’t get over my frustration at the kinds of things that count as good arguments in the political sphere. Here’s an example: I’d like to learn more about the Green party, but they seem to support a whole lot of pseudoscientific nonsense. Apparently their health care platform includes homeopathy and various other forms of alternative medical quackery. How can we be sure they won’t apply the same less-than-rational approach to the environment? If only there could be “one true party”, I thought after the leaders’ debate – a notion that, briefly, made me wonder whether I might be a closet fascist.

This doubt came up again when I was reading an article in this week’s Nature about the effect of social media on research priorities. It focused on the controversial and totally unproven “liberation procedure” for MS – extremely popular in Canada but, oddly enough, nowhere else1. The article mentioned that Michael Ignatieff has stated his support for clinical trials of the treatment, despite the recommendation by a panel of CIHR experts that a clinical trial would be premature without further evidence from observational studies1. The authors of the Nature article – a group of doctors and medical researchers in Canada – ended up somewhere close to Ignatieff’s position nonetheless. They concluded that the benefits of a full-blown experimental trial might outweigh the costs if thousands of social media-influenced patients are travelling outside of the country to receive private treatment anyway, “exposing themselves to the risks and costs”1. In other words, popularity is an important – and rational – consideration when it comes to medical science.

I have two things to offer for election day. First, there is a good summary of where the major parties stand on science and research funding here. Some are a lot more rational than others.

On to the peacocks. Democratic elections, like sexually selected traits, are communal illusions. Money is another example. The more you accept them, the more you believe in them, the better they work.

References

  1. Chafe, R. et al. 2011. Nature 472: 410-411.
  2. Lande, R. 1981. PNAS 78: 3721-3725.
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.

Continue reading →

by Roslyn

A case of mistaken celebrity

They all look the same to us. Celebrities, that is. And by us, I mean academics.

The proof starts with peacocks. Last fall, I was working on some measurements I took of the crest ornament in these birds. Peafowl have this funky little fan of feathers on top of their heads, and though it’s not that small in the grand scheme of fancy bird plumage ornaments, the peacock’s five centimetre crest looks a bit ridiculous next to the metre-and-a-half long train.

Why bother having a crest when you also have a big train? And why do females wear crests too? In this species, the crest appears to be the only plumage ornament shared by both sexes. Here are some of my pictures from the field, taken on the cusp of the breeding season:

Crest ornaments of male and female peafowl

Crests of (a) male and (b-c) female peafowl. Scale bars are 10 cm. Photos by Roslyn Dakin.

Over the years, I’ve measured the crests of close to 150 birds. These data lend some support to the idea that the crest is a signal of health in both males and females, although it might work in slightly different ways for the two sexes1. As you can see from the picture above, there is a lot of variation in how the crests look – and it’s mostly on the female side of the equation. Almost all adult males have tidy looking crests like the one shown in (a), but females often have crests with a lot of new feathers growing in (c). It turns out that males in better condition tend to have fuller, wider crests. The healthiest females, on the other hand, have crests that look most like those of males, with all feathers grown out to the top level (b).

The extreme variability among females leads to an additional hypothesis, and it’s one that I can’t rule out at this time. Perhaps the crest is a signal of individual identity that the birds use to sort out who’s who in their social groups – just as faces do for us. A clue that this could potentially work for peahens is that my field assistants and I can do it. Once you spend enough time hanging around with these birds, you find yourself recognizing certain females that haven’t been captured yet (and that therefore lack identifying leg bands). Your first clue? Usually a unique pattern of crest feathers.

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by Roslyn

Groupthink

Which animal would use Facebook most, if it could?

My poll in class last week was a popular one – a fact that I couldn’t properly enjoy, since Charlie came up with it for me in a fit of brain-dead incapacity. Charlie’s Facebook question elicited chirps of excitement, compliments and even a few drawings on the response sheets. Here are the results, ranked by favour among the students:

  • Chimpanzees: So they have opposable thumbs, and can “use the spacebar” (is this actually important in Facebook?). A number of students gave bonobos special mention, since they would probably want to keep track of all their casual sexual relationships.
  • Dolphins: Highly intelligent, social, and they might also be interested in monitoring multiple sexual conquests. Dolphins and migratory whales could use Facebook to keep in touch while roaming widely over the oceans – the long-distance relationships of the animal kingdom. For some reason, students in different tutorial groups who chose dolphins were inspired to draw them for me as well. Coincidence?
  • Parrots and other birds: Especially in species that have high levels of extra-pair paternity, birds could use Facebook as a form of mate-guarding to keep tabs on their social partner1,2. There are other reasons to think that songbirds might easily make the transition to internet gossip. Female black-capped chickadees, for instance, eavesdrop on the outcome of song contests between rival males, and use this information when deciding on a mate3.
  • Eusocial animals: Like ants or naked mole rats (the only known eusocial mammal). A couple of students also mentioned highly social meerkats, since living in groups of 10-40 individuals would require them to keep track of a lot of social information.
  • Other yappy follower-types: hyenas, seals, lemmings, and Yorkshire terriers all got a mention.

Charlie and I discussed it over dinner at the Iron Duke. My first thought went to ants, for their extreme group lifestyle. The problem is that ants don’t really care about what other ants do or think about each other. Insect sociality is all about the greater good: worker ants toil away for the colony despite having no hope of reproducing on their own. Ok, so maybe the internet isn’t conducive to real reproduction either, but ants just don’t have the ego required. Plus, as one clever student pointed out, a colony of eusocial animals are all very close genetic relatives of one another – and she tends to block family members from Facebook.

Charlie mentioned peacocks for spending so much time on courtship and preening, but I rejected that one too.

Continue reading →

by Roslyn

Masters of illusion

It can be easy to see intelligence in the animals we spend a lot of time with. Everyone has their pet example, one of the most common being dogs who can anticipate the precise time of their owners’ return. But what does this really say about the mental life of dogs? Some birds are capable of even more impressive mental stunts – only they often go unnoticed in the wild. Two recent field studies in Africa and Australia provide a nice illustration. The results challenge our notion of limited animal intelligence, but as we will see, the way we interpret them might say more about our own minds than it does about the birds.

Fork-tailed drongos are masters of deception. These small, glossy black birds from southern Africa are known for their ability to mimic the calls of other bird species – much like the mockingbirds found throughout the US and parts of southern Canada. Most of the time, drongos forage alone hunting insects, but occasionally they get other animals to do the hard work for them. Drongos will follow groups of meerkats and pied-babblers – mammals and birds known for their highly social lifestyles – and steal their food, a process known as kleptoparasitism. It might not be a complete loss for the victims, either. Drongo thieves give plenty of alarm calls along the way, and these may help the meerkat and babbler groups avoid predation1.

Perhaps not surprising for an accomplished mimic, the fork-tailed drongo has a diverse alarm call repertoire that includes its own unique warning “chink” as well as the calls of several other bird species. On the savannahs of the Kalahari Desert, birdwatchers noticed that drongos often seem to use these mimicked calls during kleptoparasitism, swooping in to steal food from pied-babblers immediately after sounding a false alarm1. For Tom Flower at the University of Cambridge, this was fascinating anecdotal evidence, so he set out to test whether these alarm calls are used by the drongos in a deceptive way2.

The first thing Flower needed to do was eliminate the possibility that the drongo false alarms are coincidental. If the drongos are truly deceptive, the calls should only occur when the birds are attempting to steal food. Flower also had to establish that the drongos sound the same, regardless of whether they are using their alarm calls in an honest or deceptive context. Finally, he had to show that the meerkats and babblers respond similarly in both cases.

Fork-tailed drongo

Fork-tailed drongo.

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by Roslyn

Deep archives: Irreducible beauty

Peacocks and audience at the Toronto Zoo

Were peacocks designed with this kind of audience in mind?

A while back I was searching for images of peacock feathers on Google, and I stumbled upon this article. It’s a piece by Stuart Burgess, an engineer who is head of the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Bristol University, and apparently also quite an opinionated creationist.

Burgess’ idea is that the peacock’s train feathers “contain an extremely high level of optimum design”, so much so that they provide evidence against Darwinian evolution. He thinks that the aesthetic features of the peacock are so complex, so contingent upon each other, that no step-by-step process of evolutionary change could have produced them. He’s right that these ornaments are highly complex, and that selection for this kind of extreme aesthetic feature presents a bit of a puzzle for evolutionary biology. To claim that the extraordinary complexity must be “irreducible”, however, is a big assumption.

The article provides a lot of amusing examples of twisted logic along the way. For example, one of the features that Burgess finds irreducibly beautiful is the fact that the peacock’s train forms a fan-like shape. This is because “the axis of every feather can be projected back to an approximately common geometrical center” – indeed, the body of the bird that grew them!

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by Roslyn

Deep archives: Lek perspective

Scene from a lek at the Bronx Zoo

Males display in the “Wild Asia” exhibit at the Bronx Zoo, which can only be seen by riding the zoo monorail. The structure behind the birds is the monorail track.

I’ve had some success on this trip after all. The weather was perfect for my model experiments yesterday (sunny, warm, not too much wind), and although I wasn’t able to fit in quite as many trials as I was hoping for, the ones that I was able to accomplish worked perfectly. Of 16 successful trials (i.e. ones where the male danced for the model), 6 ended in a copulation attempt. In California, 3 of 22 trials ended in such an attempt. This apparent geographical difference in Penelope’s popularity is a bit of a mystery (it could be because a number of my California trials were at the end of the breeding season, when males were somewhat less motivated and harder to trick). Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that overall she was a hit.

One reason I didn’t get as many trials as I could have was that the Bronx peacocks were the most skittish ones I’ve encountered so far. When I stepped into the nyala enclosure at 7 am yesterday, I had about 2 hours to collect as much data as I could (as many as 20 five-minute trials, I figured). But it took a long time for the males to get used to me being in there. I spent the first hour waiting quietly (and nervously) for one of them to make a move, while they did the same – watching me carefully and no doubt waiting for me to leave. This stand-off shouldn’t be too surprising, though, since the Bronx Zoo birds have enough space to live their entire lives away from people.

This morning, I moved across the Bronx River to work in “Wild Asia”, and the birds there were even more difficult. Happily, though, I was able to get a video of a male reacting positively to Penelope, which will be excellent for illustrating exactly how she worked.

I also made a trip to the “World of Birds” exhibit. They have some pretty amazing animals there – here is a picture of another lek-breeding bird, the lesser bird of paradise:

Juvenile male lesser bird of paradise

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by Roslyn

Deep archives: New York on foot

I’m back at the Bronx Zoo now, with the model peahen, attempting some more behavioural experiments. My first day was both good and bad. I had no trouble finding my accommodations on the zoo grounds last night – I’m staying in the “Bat Cave”, so named because of the bats.

(Not really – the apartment is called the Bat Cave because it’s on the ground floor of the building pictured below, which also houses the families of three zoo staff members that live permanently on site…)

Accommodations for humans at the Bronx Zoo

If the fact that several staff members live on site doesn’t give you a sense of how well-equipped this zoo is, perhaps the contents of my apartment will. I have my own kitchen, washer and dryer for laundry, animal-themed blankets on the bed, and if bored I can read anything from The Iliad to Seabiscuit:

Reading selection in the Bat Cave

Books in the Bat Cave: no one can complain about the selection.

The zoo even has it’s own NYPD patrol.

In the future, all police will drive golf carts.

I managed to head out this morning at 6 am, beating the peafowl by at least an hour (since, for birds, they tend to roost until fairly late in the morning). It didn’t take long to find the main lek; males were roosting conspicuously in most of the surrounding trees. It was a spectacular one – at least 10 males displaying in view of one another, with another 5-6 quite close by. At first glance, this would seem ideal. I had an excellent view of a large number of birds. However, all of the display territories were nested within mammal enclosures that I couldn’t access. The birds were just out of my reach, and I needed males in accessible areas so that I could set Penelope up nearby.

I spent the rest of the day on foot, continuing to explore the peafowl haunts with Penelope in tow (I walked at least 15 km today all told – this zoo is huge!). People were startled, fascinated and amused by Penelope, and many of them tried to talk to me about her. Normally this would have been slightly annoying, but today it helped me stay positive despite the other frustrations. By afternoon, I had managed to get a few good peacock videos and permission to work in one of the mammal enclosures for tomorrow. I’ll be in and out with Penelope before the nyala (an African antelope) are released into the enclosure for the day, and again at the end of the day after they’re put inside for the night.

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: 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.