Indian Peafowl | Pavo cristatus

Voice

In spring the male gives a piercing, plaintive may-awe that carries for kilometres and that everyone knows from zoos; alongside it a rapid series of crowing ka-aan ka-aan notes, sometimes eight in a row. Startled, it produces an explosive low honk. The female clucks softly to her chicks and when she has found food. Outside the breeding season both sexes are largely silent apart from alarm calls.

Identification

The male is the largest landfowl you will meet in the region and utterly unmistakable: deep blue on head, neck and breast, metallic green on back and rump, a bare white stripe above and below the eye, and an upright crest of some twenty bare shafts each tipped with a small vane. The train consists of about a hundred and forty to a hundred and fifty elongated upper tail coverts, each with an eye-spot of deep blue, pale blue, gold and green, raised into a fan in display. The female is coppery brown on the head, paler on the throat, dull green on the neck and otherwise speckled brown, without a train but with the same crest. Both have long grey legs; the male carries spurs.

Confusion species

Only the female presents a problem. Wild Turkey (Meleagris gallopavo), feral in New Zealand and on some Australian islands, is as large but darker, with a bare blue-red head and no crest and a broad short fanned tail. Helmeted Guineafowl (Numida meleagris) is much smaller, grey with white spots, and carries a bony casque. Common Pheasant (Phasianus colchicus) is considerably smaller, with a long pointed tail but no crest. On a large brown gamebird, the pointed crest of bare quills and the long grey legs always mean peafowl.

Habitat

Rough farmland with trees, parkland, lowland woodland and coastal pasture, and equally the human domain: gardens, parks, golf courses, farmyards and village edges, where it feeds by day and roosts high in a tree or on a roof at night. In New Zealand it also uses pine plantations. It needs open ground to walk on and tall roost trees to sit in safely; that is very nearly the whole requirement.

Range and movements

In New Zealand it is commonest in the northern North Island — Northland, Auckland, East Cape and mid Hawke's Bay — with well-known feral flocks in the upper Whanganui River catchment, on the northern Mahia Peninsula and in the pine forests of South Head on Kaipara Harbour; scattered further in Nelson, Marlborough and Canterbury, and absent from Stewart Island. In Australia the best-known population is on Kangaroo Island in South Australia, with an estimated three hundred birds around Murray Lagoon and Western Cove; flocks also walk the Canberra suburbs of Narrabundah and Pialligo, and King Island in Bass Strait, with loose birds around farms and parks almost anywhere else.

• Resident
• dark = core range, pale = thinly spread

Where and when to look

Hardly any searching is needed: drive through Northland or along Kaipara Harbour in late winter and spring and stop at the first may-awe; in display the call is almost continuous and places the flock within minutes. Then look up into the tall conifers, because that is where they sit at dusk. On Kangaroo Island the country around Murray Lagoon and the farmyards at Western Cove are the safest bet.

Conservation

Least Concern (LC) and common in its homeland; here the question is not how the species is faring but what to do about it. It came out with the colonists in the nineteenth century as an ornamental bird and was kept on estates and in animal parks; the feral flocks almost always arose from escaped or released birds and from collections simply left to themselves — the Canberra flock, for instance, probably traces back to a now-closed animal park on Mugga Lane. It was never released as a gamebird by the acclimatisation societies, which sets it apart from pheasant and turkey. Complaints concern noise, trampled and dug-over gardens, the weed seed it spreads and fouled roofs and rainwater tanks; in South Australia releasing peafowl is illegal and keepers are required to contain their birds. That last is harder than it sounds, because a peafowl flies more than a kilometre without difficulty.

Scientific name

Pavo cristatus | Linnaeus, 1758

Linnaeus described the species in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae as Pavo cristatus, and it has stayed in that genus, so author and year carry no parentheses. Pavo is simply the Latin word for peacock; it goes back through Greek taos to an eastern trade name and ultimately, most likely, to Tamil. cristatus means 'crested', after the upright fan crest both sexes carry — not after the train, which is no crest at all. The type locality is India, without further definition; the bird had by then been known in Europe for two thousand years as an ornamental and temple bird, so for his description Linnaeus scarcely had to look beyond the nearest royal garden.