The first time I saw a peacock was when one flew into our pond when I was eight. We thought he was amazing. The ducks were nonplussed. The turtle was nervous. The cat was curious. And the frogs were uncharacteristically silent. My mom rang the zoo to ask what to feed him and was told, “They like raisons.”
We asked around the neighbourhood but nobody knew where he’d come from. We were delighted at the prospect of keeping him. We had a sow, a turtle, a horse, five dogs, a cat, three ducks and countless frogs. The peacock added a nice splash of colour, though he never performed for us. All the same, we named him ‘Posh’.
Two days into his visit, a truck pulled up. A man who lived in a canyon below our street had heard the news. It was his peacock and his peahens were missing their ardent lover.
Not long after that, I was on a student art tour in London learning about the pre-raphaelite artists. I saw plenty of peacock feathers, paintings and ornaments, and my appreciation for the intricate pattern and vibrant colours deepened.
I found my first feather in the gardens at Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire, England. The second one, I bought in a shop. A few more were gifts. Eventually I had enough to make my own tail, but fanned them out in a grand vase instead. When I entered the nomadic phase of my life, I gave them to a schoolteacher for her classroom.
In recent years, I have found my path crossing more and more peacocks both physically in the grand gardens of European palaces and manor houses, and decoratively in art and design pushed down from Pinterest and other visual porn entities, and even on my nightstand in Geoffrey Miller’s The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature. In this amazing book, the peacock features as a curiosity. Why did nature make them vibrant and colourfully alluring when the peahen is colourblind?
This past weekend, I was back out on the Borromean Islands in Lago Maggiore, Italy (and deeply grateful that they are only a stone’s throw away from my present home). The islands are incredibly beautiful, framed by the alps and the blue water of the lake. Competing with this scenery, and drawing the most photo eager visitors, are the famous white peacocks. Without any colour these are spectacular and eye-catching.
Allora….I can see why the colour blind peahen would be impressed.
Whimspherical 
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