Fowlish humor of the peacock kind

Roman votive lamp, Museum August Kestner, Germany, Christian Tepper photo

My Facebook friend posted a cool Roman bronze and enamel oil lamp from the 3rd-4th c. AD. And my first naysaying thought was, did peacocks really make it to Rome that early on?

And the answer is unequivocably yes! As I let my fingers troll the starship that is Google, I got far more than I bargained for. I had no idea, for example, that there are three different species of peacocks—and not all are from India. One is from the deepest Congo. Another is from Southeast Asia. They got around. The Wiki entries are practically peacock porn. And they are all flashy, fleshy pheasants, peasant!

Think massive fancyass chicken (or the seriously misnamed Latin American turkey). Junglefowl, all. We are so habituated to barnyard chickens, we tend to forget that they are related to these exotic jungle fowl, or that they are cousins of pheasants.

Pavos paving the way for dinner since the 6th c. BC. Forget all about that enlightenment of the buddhas and the peacock’s myriad eyes. We’re talking over-the-top ostentatious feasts here where the bird was served in its jammies and feathered cloak.

This votive candle from the 3rd to 4th century A.D. was also about the time the Romans imported peacocks to Britain. Imagine the spectacle of those big birds in drag running the countryside. Forget the countryside, imagine peacocks on a tediously long sea voyage screaming help in your ear all the way from Rome. Gives me hysterical, I mean, historical pause, thinking of those over-amped birds scaring the cows and horses, not to mention the natives, who tattooed themselves blue in solidarity.

The first peacocks were brought to the continental United States in 1879, when Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin brought 3 pairs to his San Gabriel Valley ranch in Southern California. (I say continental because in 1860 Frances Sinclair brought them to Kauai’i, the Garden Isle, and from there, they spread to the other islands of Hawaii—which wasn’t yet a state, so that doesn’t count. 

The thought of peacocks in full drag, and those prim Scottish presbyterians dressed in woolen to the neck commingling in the churchyard, is a startling concept. Maybe they thought they saw God in all those eyes. Or maybe it was the pakalolo.) Ancient Hawaiians revered birds as aumakua, or ancestral spirits, and the ruling ali‘i dressed up in feathered capes and helmets. There’s a statue of Princess Kaiulani in Waikiki feeding the peacocks, she was dubbed the peacock princess because she loved them so much. But not everybody loved them. In 2009, after one sleepless night too many in Waikiki, a woman was arrested for clubbing a peacock to death because it wouldn’t shut up. 

Kartikeya & consorts riding a mayura, killer of snakes,Raja Ravi Varma

In India, the peacock is the national bird. There’s a slant pun hidden in the Latin name for the Indian peafowl (Pavo cristatus), the bird wearing the crown.

“In Hindu religion, Lord Krishna wears the peacock feathers, and the bird appears as the mount of the god of war, Lord Kartikeya. An old Hindu proverb states that the peacock has the feathers of an angel, the voice of the devil, and the walk of a thief.” —Peafowl: In History & Culture

But back to the other continent. Apparently a good time was had by all because they (the peacocks, not the incontinent snowbirds) soon spread to Florida—how, I’m not certain. It’s not like California and Florida are contiguous. Perhaps some other form of locomotion was involved. Because they certainly didn’t fly there. Have you ever seen a peacock in flight, not the most aerodynamic of birds, they look like flapping kimonos swooping on the wing. Even the ocellated turkeys, inveterate fence sitters of the Yucatán have better aerodynamics than a peacock.

(Please don’t even get me started on the scourge of wild turkeys that the Department of Fish and Game dumped on California. They were never native. Our fancy ocellated turkeys apparently died from drought during the last Ice Age, along with the native horse. They were once thought to be an intermediary between the Indian peafowl and the Mexican ocellated turkey. Now we have gangs of alien turkey bullies from the Rio Grande flashing their snoods, chest-bumping car doors and knocking down senior citizens at bus stops. Adds a whole new meaning to the term, turkey trot.)

Theoretically, that Macedonian, Alexander the Great introduced peacocks to the Classical World, but there’s an even earlier Greek reference as well.

“Peafowl reached Greece by the late 6th century BCE, probably first on the island of Samos (close to Turkey), where they were sacred to the goddess Hera.” Birds of thr World

Of course, I find that wildly amusing that both peacocks and turkeys were first brought to Samos, an island within speeding distance of Türkiye, where the name of our North American turkey was appropriated, and renamed —and suddenly become Turkified in the process. Nom nom nom. Samos was the birthplace of Pythagoras, who knew an acute angle when he saw it, and philosopher Epicurus, who produced an exceptional, sweet Muscat wine that paired nicely with roast peacock.

Our neighbors down the road had peacocks who would inappropriately yell out, help, help, help! from nearby trees in the middle of the night, leaving our other neighbors’ cityslicker guests shaken, believing that a woman was being murdered in the bushes. They didn’t stay long. As it turns out, some women were being murdered in the bushes, the poor peahens sitting on their nests like dead ducks, or stool pigeons, who became late midnight snacks for marauding mountain lions.

We liked chasing the ostentatious ocellated fowl for their ocelli feathers—this was long before the whole peacock feather rage took over Marin hot tubs, thanks to Cyra McFadden’s weekly column in the Pacific Sun, The Serial: a Year in the Life of Marin County. For 52 weeks we were tortured with a skewed version of what life was like for blow-ins who had recently relocated to Marin County during the swinging 70s. But she was a blow-in, a Montana transplant. But then again, so were the peacocks. 

Who remembers the awful 1980 film, The Serial, with Tuesday Weld and Martin Mull? My childhood friend Mark Rasmussen was the hunk in the hot tub dressed in, um, peacock feathers. Marin’s version of Buddhist purification. We never quite lived down that social stigmata—we were crucified and ridiculed by the press, so we took it on, and owned it with even more peacock feather pride.

But, back to those peacocks….According to Wiki:

“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". When Alexander saw the birds in India, he was so amazed at their beauty that he threatened the severest penalties for any man who slew one.”

But no one paid him any heed and ate them anyway.

“In ancient Rome, peafowl were served as a delicacy.The dish was introduced there in approximately 35 B.C.E. The poet Horace ridiculed the eating of peafowl, saying they tasted like chicken.”— Wiki

Peacocks arrived late to the rest of northern Europe, and the king of birds was a delicacy on the royal medieval tables of Europe, to be quickly displaced by New World turkeys. Which makes me wonder what happened to the peacocks of Britain after the Romans left. No matter that the peacock symbolized resurrection, renewal, and immortality. Medieval knights made New Year's resolutions by placing their mitts on a live or roasted peacock to recommit to the ideals of chivalry. Not only can you swear fealty to, you can manhandle your gods and eat them as well. 

O Immortal chicken! Preferred food and ride of the gods. Hopefully they ate them after they got to where they were going. Otherwise, they would be stuck in some sort of godlike limbolandia, as purgatory had not yet been invented. Adds a whole new level of meaning to Pimp my ride.