Crying Fowl: Peacocks Make Pesky Neighbors

Their raucous cries echo across Cougar, Tiger and Squak mountains for hours at night during the mating season.

They strut majestically across suburban lawns, prompting residents to call the zoo to ask if any birds have escaped.

Although they're beautiful, the wild peacocks have a bad habit of munching flowers and pooping in back yards.

"They're in all the mountains around us, everywhere in the woods" on the Eastside, says Peter Rittler, administrator of the Washington Zoological Park.

Rittler should know. In his small Cougar Mountain zoo, he has a pair of black-shouldered peafowl. During their long mating season, the wild fowl come a-courting.

The peafowl walking - and occasionally flying - around suburban woods are garden-variety India blues, which hail from India and have characteristic blue heads and throats, Rittler says. While peafowl can fly, they are more at home on the ground. Rittler estimates several dozen live in the Cougar Mountain area.

Peafowl are hardy birds. In their native India, they are much loved because they eat baby cobras.

When Cougar Mountain resident Monty Lennox first spotted the birds in the wild, he called a neighbor who used to own peacocks. The man, who didn't want the birds anymore, conceded they were probably his.

Three of the birds now live in Lennox's back yard, and he throws them peanuts to keep them around.

"It's been a joy, even after all these years," he said. But Lennox acknowledges the peacocks have not endeared themselves to everyone.

Wildlife trapper John Consolini of Redmond said he received a handful of calls from Woodinville-area residents who wanted him to get rid of a pair of peacocks. Apparently, the price was too high in relation to the nuisance they caused. Neighbors complained because of the noise and bird droppings on cars, Consolini said. "The noise is ear-piercing."

Murray Schlenker, state Department of Wildlife area manager for the Charlotte Y. Martin Urban Wildlife Interpretive Area, spent three months trying to catch 14 of the crafty birds in a Steilacoom-area neighborhood.

The birds were descendants of fowl that lived on a game farm. When the farm closed, the birds moved into the neighborhood. Residents complained because the peacocks dug up gardens and tore cedar shingles off houses, Schlenker said.

He chased the birds through back yards, brandishing a modified seal net and apologizing to startled residents. Eventually, he caught the birds by feeding them bread with a tranquilizing drug.

The great peafowl roundup netted 14 birds, which now live at a Department of Wildlife game farm on Whidbey Island.