Gabriola’s peacocks
Have you come across Gabriola’s peacocks? Morri Mostow explains what it’s like to live with them:
Five tame male peacocks of varying sizes and ages, all with magnificent plumage, roam and roost on our modest one-acre Gabriola Island property. They aren’t officially ours, of course. Based on local lore, we gather that they escaped from a nearby hobby farm.
Apparently, a city couple turned hobby farmers imagined raising exotic birds as a way to finance their retirement to our rustic, rural BC island. Story has it that the couple penned in the peacocks with 12–foot fencing: three feet buried to keep out predators, and nine feet aboveground to keep out deer. Apart from raccoons, Gabriola has no predators. Seems no one considered that peacocks can fly! So, off they flew, along with the couple’s retirement dream.
A while later, they sold the would-be bird farm and fled back to the city, where eggs come in cartons and fowl comes shrink wrapped.
Six months ago, shortly after our arrival on Gabriola from the Eastern Townships of Quebec, those now naturalized peacocks discovered [continue]
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