Oh my, the peacock got me in its ban. It’s the third bird, and bird is the word. And it’s getting worse than this rhyme from The Trashmen’s hit ‘Surfin’ bird’ from 1963.
World Peacock Day is celebrated every year on November 15 since 2022. Pavo cristatus is the National bird of India. I saw many of them in Sri Lanka, they are basically everywhere, and you can hear the famous ‘miauuuu’ call especially in the morning.
Cock is an onomatopoeic term, that means it derives from the imitation of the sound the bird makes. Other examples are ‘Dik-dik’, ‘Cuckoo’, or ‘Pobblebonk (the banjo frog)’. The call of a peacock has a lot of different spellings in different countries. My ‘miauuu’ is very German. Mayur, may-awe, eee-iu, ka-aaan are some examples.
Since some people also saw similarities to the male body part, cock has at least two meanings, which some countries (American English, Canadian English, and Australian English) then replaced by rooster, from ‘roost’, like a wooden framework, in the end the roof, on which birds and other animals like to sit. In Great Britain cock is used, and Belgium for example calls the official emblem of Wallonia ‘Walloon cockerel’ – ‘coq hardi’ in French. I haven’t come across the term pearooster though. Birds are often named after their sounds, and there I finally have an answer why there are some funny names. Chiffchaff, kookaburra, weero and killdeer are birds! Wikipedia has a list of ‘cross-linguistic onomatopoeias’ with plenty of funny words. There’s even a supervillain in DC comics, where onomatopoeic terms work very well (zoink!)…
The peacock is a huge bird native to India and Sri Lanka. Pavo cristatus is also called the blue peafowl, while the only other extant species, P. muticus from South East Asia, is the green peafowl.
They belong to the family Phasianidae, and have some famous relatives there, in total 185. Junglefowls (genus Gallus) are the ancestors of chicken. 50 billion (!) Gallus gallus domesticus are produced annually. Turkeys (genus Meleagris), pheasants, and quails are also close relatives of the peacock.
Carl Linnaeus described P. cristatus in 1758 in his 10th edition of the Systema Naturae. Pavo cristatus translates to ‘crested peacock’. Pavo developed from Tamil ‘tokei’ to ‘tavus’ and ‘taos’ to Pavo. It points at the long feathers, or train, and is likely the root of the pea in peacock.
Pheasant is interesting, it is named after the river Phasis, which is in Georgia and now called Rioni. There’s a quote I like, so I’ll end my peafowl story with it later.
I don’t know what Linnaeus thought about the peacock, but it seems other humans had a love/ hate relationship to it.
Charles Darwin wrote ‘To Asa Gray’ ‘The sight of a feather in a peacock’s tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!’ You can read it on darwinproject.ac.uk. That had to do with his famous work on evolution. Why would a peacock be so colorful, with a long train of feathers, that makes him vulnerable? He later defined it as sexual selection. Maybe it’s even a proof of concept. When the most beautiful male is alive, it must be a good one. And that’s not only the peacock, Banko’s feathered dragon, a bird that lived 121 million years ago, seems to have had long feathers already. If Darwin would have known! Find the story on zmescience.com.
Aristotle is quoted “Some animals are jealous and self-conceited, as the peacock.”, and Gaius Plinius Secondus, called Pliny the Elder, called them “not only ostentatious but also spiteful”. He’s the ‘inventor’ of the nutshell. Quite some opinion on an animal without any facial expressions…
But the Greeks liked them enough to bring them to Europe, and the Romans did the rest to spread the species out. They weren’t only for decoration, they were a source of meat. Today the blue peacock is sometimes consumed, but of course not in India. The green peacock is an endangered species and thus protected.
And if you walk with Argus eyes through parks and zoos, you might have noticed the eye patches on the peacocks feathers. There is a story told so many times (on the internet) already. I asked chatgpt to rewrite it in a modern language.
‘Jupiter was out here cheating on his wife Juno, but obviously didn’t want to get caught. So, when his side chick Io became a problem, he literally turned her into a whole white cow.
Except Juno wasn’t born yesterday. She saw straight through his little disguise, claimed the cow as a gift and assigned Argus, a giant with 100 eyes, to keep tabs on her 24/7. Basically, the ultimate security system.
Jupiter wasn’t having it, so he sent Mercury to deal with Argus. Mercury, a certified yapper, managed to put all 100 eyes to sleep and then took him out.
Juno was devastated by the loss of her loyal muscle. To honour him, she took all 100 of his eyes and put them on the tail feathers of her sacred peacock.’ She chose the peacock because it was a symbol of wealth and royalty. I wonder if ancient Indians shared Aristoteles, and Pliny the Elder’s opinion on the bird’s character?!
There are many paintings of that scene, but Peter Paul Rubens is one of the few that painted the exact moment of eye-transfer in his 249 cm × 296 cm large ‘Juno and Argus’ from 1610.
Back to the namegiver of our bird’s family, the Phasianidae:
Plato said roughly 2400 years ago:
“I believe that the earth is very large and that we who dwell between the pillars of Hercules and the river Phasis live in a small part of it about the sea, like ants or frogs about a pond”
