PEAFOWL Pavo cristatus
Redlist status: Least concern
Peacocks and peahens (known as peafowl) are native to the Indian subcontinent.
Peacocks are 100 to 115 cm and with a fully-grown train they can be as much as 195 to 225 cm and weigh 4–6 kg. The females, or peahens, are smaller at around 95 cm in length and weigh 2.75–4 kg.
Peafowls have 11 different calls, but the peacocks are the ones that really yell!
Peafowls have a strict routine in the wild - they sleep in large groups in trees overnight and break up into small groups for the day. At midday, peafowl drink, preen their feathers, and rest in the shade. Peafowl forage for food in the morning and late afternoon when it is cooler. Then one last quick drink and up to their roost for the night. Peafowl forages on the ground for grain, insects, small reptiles and mammals, berries, figs, leaves, seeds, and flower parts.
The peacock’s back and belly have iridescent feathers in a scale pattern but we know them best as having the long “train” which are the long feathers that cover the base of the tail. The train is covered in ocelli, which are round spots that look like eyes. A peacock grows his first shorter train at 2 years but it has no ocelli. The train gets longer and more elaborate every year until it reaches its maximum splendor at five or six years of age. The full train can be 1.8 -2.1 metres when fanned into a semi-circle.
Mating season coincides with the monsoons (June-September). The peahen raises her chicks all by herself! The peahen makes a scrape in the ground and lines it with sticks, where she lays three to eight light green or tanEmu eggs and sits on them almost constantly for about four weeks. The peachicks are able to walk and forage on their own right after they hatch. It takes two weeks before they can flap up into a tree for safety, where they crowd on both sides of their mother and are covered by her wings.
At four weeks, the young grow crests, and at two months they look just like their mother (both males and females) but are only half her size. It is not until their second year that the males achieve their mature coloring.