She’s Always in a Fowl Mood

Wow. I hit a nerve with the parrot column — would have thought some of the other, on-the-face-of-them, more controversial columns might have caused this ruckus, but it was the parrots that brought out the letters and has people starting conversations in line at the Post Office.

It appears La Cañada either loves these little green-and-orange guys, or HATES them. Kind of like the great Peacock Schism that has existed in our town since the middle of last century when they (here we go again) escaped from “somewhere” and “began breeding.”

Even though they wake me up on the rare morning I might have no pressing reason to rise early, I actually like the parrots. Now here’s where I will really annoy a lot of folks — I like the peacocks too.

Of course I don’t have any living in MY neighborhood. No peacocks landing on our roof like a disabled 747. No startling cries that sound unsettlingly like HELP! No peacocks eating my flowers and tomatoes (Royal says we could go to Europe for what those tomatoes cost to raise) and then reprocessing them onto my veranda.

But I did have chickens (if you give the tiniest little hoot about the chickens you can read of their shiny-little-lives and their lurid demises in old issues of the Valley Sun, “The Chicken Wars”), and they pooped and cackled and occasionally crowed (they were females, but go figure).

But I do spend lots of time with peacocks. Our close friends, late of Beulah Drive and now of Peacock Hill Ranch in Shadow Hills, have a whole population of these creatures and, since I have kept our horses at their place for the past decade or so, I am constantly hobnobbing with les oiseauxs (da boids, in English).

Their nextdoor neighbor is a retired vet so he has the time and the knowledge to actually play with breeding peacocks. His most notable accomplishment is the all- white peacock. That’s dazzling but strangely off spectacle; pure snowy white, even to the eyes on the ends of the long fan feathers. Then they, of course, escaped his aviary and started breeding. NO! REALLY?! Who could have seen THAT coming? The next years saw the weirdest flocks of partially white and partially colored birds. Then some regular green-and-blue with just some white blotchy areas, and this year nature seems to have cleaned up his little experiment to the point that only one male had a single white wing-feather to prove it hadn’t all been my imagination.

In season they follow you around the ranch, positioning themselves to startle you as you come around a corner, they go into full display, extending their fabulous fan and alternately strutting and pirouetting like a high-fashion runway-model. At that moment I always remember Ben Stiller in Zoolander and crack up, but since peacocks don’t see movies, they don’t get it. Often they seem to think I am not properly impressed by their magnificence so they “shake.” This rapid-fire rattling of their tails and fan is really neat and I always clap. I’m a good audience.

Our friends know them all as individuals, with names and personalities. They’ll say “Oh, that’s Pierre, he’s the friendly one. He really likes cat chow and will strut regally through the house looking for me if he wants a snack.”

I know that. I came out of the bathroom one day and ran smack into Pierre (who looked peeved at my clumsiness).

Then there’s Gaston, a big handsome fellow who has, my friends inform me, “a second brain-cell to rub together.”

The ranch dogs, a lot of them and large, are all completely cowed by the peafowl, even the hens have nothing to fear from these otherwise very-in-charge dogs. Cats give them wide berth.

So I am used to hearing them hit the roof and scrabble for a foothold, sounding as though they are going right over the edge (but they never do). I’ve often ridden in the arena and had something huge and dark sail so close over my head I’ve felt their claws brush my helmet as they aim for a night roost in the huge pines. Sadly, I have stepped in peacock poop. Ick. But not often, if fed away from the patio they tend to poop away too. (Betcha never saw so much poop talk in our local paper, well, not since the last city council election.)

It’s just that they look so glorious wandering around (that single lonely brain-cell firing like mad trying to tell them what to do) the same way the chickens looked so good flashing across the lawns like little black-and-gold-comets with iridescent rainbow tails. And now these parrots affect me the same way. I love that they live wild up here and flit greenly through the trees with those bursts of red-range.

I’ll put up with the shrieking and the fruit thievery. They eat no more than the squirrels, one of whom strode into our open front door, stopped, stood up full length on his hind legs and stared at the long case clock for several minutes before tearing his gaze away, looked expectantly at me (then disgustedly), shook himself and crept slowly outside. I guess Pierre called him to say houses have cat chow inside — you just have to go ask.