I walk by a house with a peacock figure in the front yard. It is unusual because there is a black and white sort of pinwheel in the middle that whirrs whenever the wind blows. I don’t think peacocks have black and white feathers, but the spinning whirligig creates a unique effect. I don’t have much experience with peacocks except as a child seeing the NBC peacock logo on television and viewing the peacock’s beautiful plumage in zoos. I do know that like most species in nature, the male peacock is the most colorful. There is a private school in Addison that allows peacocks to roam the campus. One of the teachers said they would always come to her outside door every day at the same time because they knew that’s when she would feed them. I also had a friend whose last name was Peacock. In the tiled entry hall of the home they built, she and her husband made sure there was a peacock design. Peacocks are the elegant residents of the bird kingdom. Let’s find out more about them.
According to Wikipedia, peafowl is a common name for three bird species in the genera Pavo and Afropavo of the family Phasianidae, the pheasants and their allies. Male peafowl are referred to as peacocks and female peafowl are referred to as peahens, even though peafowl of either sex are often referred to colloquially as "peacocks."
The two Asiatic species are the blue or Indian peafowl originally of the Indian subcontinent, and the green peafowl of Southeast Asia; the one African species is the Congo peafowl, native only to the Congo Basin. Male peafowl are known for their piercing calls and their extravagant plumage. The latter is especially prominent in the Asiatic species, which have an eye-spotted "tail" or "train" of covert feathers, which they display as part of a courtship ritual.
The functions of the elaborate iridescent coloration and large "train" of peacocks have been the subject of extensive scientific debate. English naturalist Charles Darwin suggested that they served to attract females, and the showy features of the males had evolved by sexual selection. More recently, Israeli evolutionary biologist Amotz Zahavi proposed in his handicap theory that these features acted as honest signals of the males' fitness, since less fit males would be disadvantaged by the difficulty of surviving with such large and conspicuous structures.
Plumage
The Indian peacock has iridescent blue and green plumage, mostly metallic blue and green, but the green peacock has green and bronze body feathers. In both species, females are a little smaller than males in terms of weight and wingspan, but males are significantly longer due to the "tail," also known as a "train." The peacock train consists not of tail quill feathers, but highly elongated upper tail coverts. These feathers are marked with eyespots, best seen when a peacock fans his tail. Both sexes of all species have a crest atop the head. The Indian peahen has a mixture of dull grey, brown and green in her plumage. The female also displays her plumage to ward off female competition or signal danger to her young.
Green peafowl differ from Indian peafowl in that the male has green and gold plumage and black wings with a sheen of blue. Unlike Indian peafowl, the green peahen is similar to the male, but has shorter upper tail coverts, a more coppery neck and overall less iridescence.
The Congo peacock male does not display his covert feathers but uses his actual tail feathers during courtship displays. These feathers are much shorter than those of the Indian and green species, and the ocelli are much less pronounced. Females of the Indian and African species are dull grey and/or brown.
Chicks of both sexes in all the species are cryptically colored. They vary between yellow and tawny, usually with patches of darker brown or light tan and "dirty white" ivory.
Color and pattern variations
Hybrids between Indian peafowl and green peafowl are called spaldings, after the first person to successfully hybridize them, Mrs. Keith Spalding. Unlike many hybrids, spaldings are fertile and generally benefit from hybrid vigor; spaldings with a high-green phenotype do much better in cold temperatures than the cold-intolerant green peafowl while still looking like their green parents. Plumage varies between individual spaldings, with some looking far more like green peafowl and some looking far more like blue peafowl, though most visually carry traits of both.
In addition to the wild-type "blue" coloration, several hundred variations in color and pattern are recognized as separate morphs of the Indian Blue among peafowl breeders. Pattern variations include solid-wing/black shoulder (the black and brown stripes on the wing are instead one solid color), pied, white-eye (the ocelli in a male's eye feathers have white spots instead of black) and silver pied (a mostly white bird with small patches of color). Color variations include white, purple, Buford bronze, opal, midnight, charcoal, jade and taupe, as well as the sex-linked colors purple, cameo, peach and Sonja's violeta. Additional color and pattern variations are first approved by the United Peafowl Association to become officially recognized as a morph among breeders. Alternately colored peafowl are born differently colored than wild-type peafowl, and though each color is recognizable at hatch, their peachick plumage does not necessarily match their adult plumage.
Occasionally, peafowl appear with white plumage. Although albino peafowl do exist, this is quite rare, and almost all white peafowl are not albinos; they have a genetic condition called leucism, which causes pigment cells to fail to migrate from the neural crest during development. Leucistic peafowl can produce pigment but not deposit the pigment to their feathers, resulting in their blue-grey eye color and the complete lack of coloration in their plumage. Pied peafowl are affected by partial leucism, where only some pigment cells fail to migrate, resulting in birds that have color but also have patches absent of all color; they, too, have blue-grey eyes. By contrast, true albino peafowl would have a complete lack of melanin, resulting in irises that look red or pink. Leucistic peachicks are born yellow and become fully white as they mature.
Iridescence
As with many birds, vibrant iridescent plumage colors are not primarily pigments but structural coloration. Optical interference Bragg reflections, based on regular, periodic nanostructures of the barbules — fiber-like components — of the feathers, produce the peacock's colors. Slight changes to the spacing of these barbules result in different colors. Brown feathers are a mixture of red and blue: one color is created by the periodic structure and the other is created by a Fabry-Pérot interference peak from reflections from the outer and inner boundaries. In optics, a Fabry–Pérot interferometer or etalon is an optical cavity made from two parallel reflecting surfaces i.e., thin mirrors. Such structural coloration causes the iridescence of the peacock's hues. Interference effects depend on light angle rather than actual pigments. Most commonly, during a courtship display, the visiting female peahen will stop directly in front of the male peacock — thus providing her the ability to assess the male at 90° to the surface of the feather. Then, the male will turn and display his feathers about 45° to the right of the sun’s azimuth which allows the sunlight to accentuate the iridescence of his train. If the female chooses to interact with the male, he will then turn to face her and shiver his train so as to begin the mating process.
Evolution and sexual selection
Charles Darwin suggested in “On the Origin of Species” that the peafowl's plumage had evolved through sexual selection. He expanded upon this suggestion in his second book, “The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex.”
The sexual struggle is of two kinds; in the one it is between individuals of the same sex, generally the males, in order to drive away or kill their rivals, the females remaining passive; while in the other, the struggle is likewise between the individuals of the same sex, in order to excite or charm those of the opposite sex, generally the females, which no longer remain passive, but select the more agreeable partners.
Sexual selection is the ability of male and female organisms to exert selective forces on each other with regard to mating activity. The strongest driver of sexual selection is gamete — reproductive or sex cell — size. In general, eggs are bigger than sperm, and females produce fewer gametes than males. This leads to eggs being a bigger investment, so to females being choosy about the traits that will be passed on to her offspring by males. The peahen's reproductive success and the likelihood of survival of her chicks is partly dependent on the genotype of the mate. Females generally have more to lose when mating with an inferior male due to her gametes being more costly than the male's.
Female choice
Multiple hypotheses attempt to explain the evolution of female choice. Some of these suggest direct benefits to females, such as protection, shelter or nuptial gifts that sway the female's choice of mate. Another hypothesis is that females choose mates with good genes. Males with more exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics, such as bigger, brighter peacock trains, tend to have better genes in the peahen's eyes. These better genes directly benefit her offspring, as well as her fitness and reproductive success. Runaway selection also seeks to clarify the evolution of the peacock's train. In runaway sexual selection, linked genes in males and females code for sexually dimorphic traits in males and preference for those traits in females. The close spatial association of alleles for loci involved in the train in males and for preference for more exuberant trains in females, on the chromosome — linkage disequilibrium — causes a positive feedback loop that exaggerates both the male traits and the female preferences. Another hypothesis is sensory bias, in which females have a preference for a trait in a non-mating context that becomes transferred to mating. Multiple causality for the evolution of female choice is also possible.
Work concerning female behavior in many species of animals has sought to confirm Darwin's basic idea of female preference for males with certain characteristics as a major force in the evolution of species. Females have often been shown to distinguish small differences between potential mates and to prefer mating with individuals bearing the most exaggerated characters. In some cases, those males have been shown to be more healthy and vigorous, suggesting that the ornaments serve as markers indicating the males' abilities to survive, and thus, their genetic qualities.
The peacock's train and iridescent plumage are perhaps the best-known example of traits believed to have arisen through sexual selection, though with some controversy. Male peafowl erect their trains to form a shimmering fan in their display to females. Marion Petrie tested whether or not these displays signaled a male's genetic quality by studying a feral population of peafowl in Whipsnade Wildlife Park in southern England. The number of eyespots in the train predicted a male's mating success. She was able to manipulate this success by cutting the eyespots off some of the males' tails: females lost interest in pruned males and became attracted to untrimmed ones. Males with fewer eyespots, thus with lower mating success, suffered from greater predation. She allowed females to mate with males with differing numbers of eyespots and reared the offspring in a communal incubator to control for differences in maternal care. Chicks fathered by more ornamented males weighed more than those fathered by less ornamented males, an attribute generally associated with better survival rate in birds. These chicks were released into the park and recaptured one year later. Those with heavily ornamented feathers were better able to avoid predators and survive in natural conditions. Thus, Petrie's work has shown correlations between tail ornamentation, mating success and increased survival ability in both the ornamented males and their offspring.
Furthermore, peafowl and their sexual characteristics have been used in the discussion of the causes for sexual traits. Amotz Zahavi used the excessive tail plumes of male peafowls as evidence for his "handicap principle." Since these trains are likely to be deleterious to an individual's survival — as their brilliance makes them more visible to predators and their length hinders escape from danger — Zahavi argued that only the fittest males could survive the handicap of a large train. Thus, a brilliant train serves as an honest indicator for females that these highly ornamented males are good at surviving for other reasons, so are preferable mates. This theory may be contrasted with Ronald Fisher's theory and Darwin's hypothesis that male sexual traits are the result of initially arbitrary aesthetic selection by females.
In contrast to Petrie's findings, a seven-year Japanese study of free-ranging peafowl concluded that female peafowl do not select mates solely on the basis of their trains. Mariko Takahashi found no evidence that peahens preferred peacocks with more elaborate trains — such as with more eyespots, a more symmetrical arrangement or a greater length. Takahashi determined that the peacock's train was not the universal target of female mate choice, showed little variance across male populations and did not correlate with male physiological condition. Adeline Loyau and her colleagues responded that alternative and possibly central explanations for these results had been overlooked. They concluded that female choice might indeed vary in different ecological conditions.
Food courtship theory
Merle Jacobs' food-courtship theory states that peahens are attracted to peacocks for the resemblance of their eye spots to blueberries.
Natural selection and vocalization
It has been suggested that a peacock's train, loud call and fearless behavior have been formed by natural selection — not sexual selection, and served as an aposematic — advertising by an animal to potential predators that it is not worth attacking or eating — display to intimidate predators and rivals. In courtship, vocalization stands to be a primary way for peacocks to attract peahens. Some studies suggest that the intricacy of the "song" produced by displaying peacocks proved to be impressive to peafowl. Singing in peacocks usually occurs just before, just after, or sometimes during copulation.
Behavior
Peafowl are forest birds that nest on the ground, but roost in trees. They are terrestrial feeders. All species of peafowl are believed to be polygamous. The males possess metatarsal spurs or "thorns" on their legs used during intraspecific territorial fights with some other members of their kind.
Diet
Peafowl are omnivores and eat mostly plants, flower petals, seed heads, insects and other arthropods, reptiles and amphibians. Wild peafowl look for their food scratching around in leaf litter either early in the morning or at dusk. They retreat to the shade and security of the woods for the hottest portion of the day. These birds are not picky and will eat almost anything they can fit in their beak and digest. They actively hunt insects like ants, crickets and termites; millipedes; and other arthropods and small mammals. Indian peafowl also eat small snakes.
Domesticated peafowl may also eat bread and cracked grain such as oats and corn, cheese, cooked rice and sometimes cat food. It has been noticed by keepers that peafowl enjoy protein-rich food including larvae that infest granaries, different kinds of meat and fruit, as well as vegetables including dark leafy greens, broccoli, carrots, beans, beets and peas.
Indian peafowl
The peafowl is native to India, while also displaying significance in its culture. In Hinduism, the Indian peacock is the mount of the God of war, Lord Kartikeya, the Warrior Goddess Kaumari and is also depicted around Goddess Santoshi. During a war with Asuras, Karthikeya split the demon king Surapadman in half. Out of respect for his adversary's prowess in battle, the God converted the two halves as an integral part of himself. One half became a peacock serving as his mount, and the other a rooster adorning his flag. The peacock displays the divine shape of Omkara when it spreads its magnificent plumes into a full-blown circular form. Peacock feathers also adorn the crest of Lord Krishna, an avatar of Lord Vishnu, one of the trimurti, triple deity of supreme divinity in Hinduism.
Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of the Mauryan Empire, was born an orphan and raised by a family farming peacocks. Chandragupta ascribed its name as Maurya or मौर्य, translating to "peacock-ness." After conquering the Nanda Empire and defeating the Seleucid Empire, Chandragupta established the uncontested power of its time. Its royal emblem remained the peacock until Emperor Ashoka changed it to lions, as seen in the Lion Capital of Ashoka, as well in his edicts. The peacocks significance of elegance and royalty pertained in India during medieval times, as it was the Mughal seat of power called the Peacock Throne.
The peacock is represented in both the Burmese and Sinhalese zodiacs. To the Sinhalese people, the peacock is the third animal of the zodiac of Sri Lanka.
Peacocks — often a symbol of pride and vanity — were believed to deliberately consume poisonous substances in order to become immune to them, as well as to make the colors of their resplendent plumage all the more vibrant — seeing as so many poisonous flora and fauna are so colorful due to aposematism, this idea appears to have merit. The Buddhist deity Mahāmāyūrī is depicted seated on a peacock. Peacocks are seen supporting the throne of Amitabha, the ruby red sunset-colored archetypal Buddha of Infinite Light.
India adopted the peacock as its national bird in 1963, and it is one of the national symbols of India.
Elsewhere
In Persia and Babylonia, the peacock is seen as a guardian to royalty and is often engraved upon royal thrones. Nonetheless, using the peacock as the symbol of royalty has an old and distinguished pedigree in India too.
Melek Taus, the "Peacock Angel," is the Yazidi name for the central figure of their faith. The Yazidi consider Tawûsê Melek an emanation of God and a benevolent angel who has redeemed himself from his fall and has become a demiurge — an artisan-like figure responsible for fashioning and maintaining the physical universe — who created the cosmos from the cosmic egg. After he repented, he wept for 7,000 years, his tears filling seven jars, which then quenched the fires of hell. In art and sculpture, Tawûsê Melek is depicted as a peacock.
Ancient Greeks believed that the flesh of peafowl did not decay after death, so it became a symbol of immortality. In Hellenistic imagery, the Greek goddess Hera's chariot was pulled by peacocks, birds not known to Greeks before the conquests of Alexander. Alexander's tutor, Aristotle, refers to it as "the Persian bird." Alexander was so amazed of their beauty, when he saw the birds in India, that he threatened the severest penalties for any man who slew one. Claudius Aelianus writes that there were peacocks in India larger than anywhere else.
One myth states that Hera's servant, the hundred-eyed Argus Panoptes, was instructed to guard the woman-turned-cow, Io. Hera had transformed Io into a cow after learning of Zeus's interest in her. Zeus had the messenger of the gods, Hermes, kill Argus through eternal sleep and free Io. According to Ovid, to commemorate her faithful watchman, Hera had the hundred eyes of Argus preserved forever, in the peacock's tail.
The symbolism was adopted by early Christianity, thus many early Christian paintings and mosaics show the peacock. The peacock is still used in the Easter season, especially in the east. The “eyes” in the peacock's tail feathers symbolize the all-seeing Christian God and — in some interpretations —the Church. A peacock drinking from a vase is used as a symbol of a Christian believer drinking from the waters of eternal life. The peacock can also symbolize the cosmos if one interprets its tail with its many “eyes” as the vault of heaven dotted by the sun, moon and stars. By Christian adoption of old Persian and Babylonian symbolism, in which the peacock was associated with paradise and the Tree of Life, the bird is again associated with immortality. In Christian iconography, the peacock is often depicted next to the Tree of Life.
Among Ashkenazi Jews, the golden peacock is a symbol for joy and creativity, with quills from the bird's feathers being a metaphor for a writer's inspiration.
The peacock motif was revived in the Renaissance iconography that unified Hera and Juno, and on which European painters focused.
In 1956, John J. Graham created an abstraction of an 11-feathered peacock logo for American broadcaster NBC. This brightly hued peacock was adopted due to the increase in color programming. NBC's first color broadcasts showed only a still frame of the colorful peacock. The emblem made its first on-air appearance on May 22, 1956. The current, six-feathered logo debuted on May 12, 1986.
A group of peacocks is called an "ostentation" or a "muster."
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