Why Peacocks?: An Unlikely Search for Meaning in the World’s Most Magnificent Bird by Sean Flynn
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Sy Montgomery’s warm review in the New York Times of Flynn’s engaging book had me reserving it at the library immediately. As it happened, a bookstore I follow on Facebook (Watermark Books in Wichita, KS) held a free online live author talk the day the book came in for me. One benefit of Zoom author talks is that the author can present while sitting inside the peacock (or, more correctly, peafowl) pen and we could see the cast of characters wandering around (and shrieking) in the background.
After many years of covering wars, mass shootings and other catastrophes, Flynn admits he had gotten to a place where he struggled to maintain his necessary “distance” from the grief and trauma he wrote about. In the online interview, he mentions a career combat photographer he knows who did “brilliant” work in Iraq, Afghanistan and other such hellholes for a long time. And now he only takes photos of fish. Flynn has peacocks. He and his family on their little “phony farm” in North Carolina already had two chickens, a pug, a cat who lived in the okra patch, and a tenant mini-horse. But one day he gets a text asking if he could use a peacock. “Yes, please,” replies his wife (a lifelong admirer of Flannery O’Connor, a famous peafowl fancier). They know virtually nothing about them, but his first view of an India blue male in all its splendor mesmerizes him. So there they are, hosts to two peacocks and a peahen (first mistake).
This is not the cute Durrells-in-Corfu kind of charm; madcap pratfalls and hilarity do not consistently ensue – it is often funny, but in the dry, wry voice of a middle-aged man actually a bit puzzled by what has happened to him. He is surprised by the cheery charm of chickens, and it takes him a while to understand the peacocks, who are cautious, quite serious, and much harder to win over. But being a journalist – and a very good one – he knows how to learn about stuff, and writes about it expertly, thoughtfully, and vividly. He weaves in chapters on the history and mythology surrounding peacocks, the structure of their spectacular trains, and the people who breed and keep them (including an heiress who founded a hospital near where I work, and “invented” a new cross-breed of peafowl). There are battles where feral peafowl wander upscale neighborhoods: some people love them, others hate them, and a serial killer starts leaving pea-corpses in the streets. They are big, noisy, destructive – they fight their reflections in shiny car bumpers and scream all night long during the breeding season. Flynn learns they are not at all the elegant, decorative yard ornaments he had expected. They are themselves, with their own needs, desires, and thoughts, just wanting to live their peacock lives. And though he doesn’t investigate it in the same long-form journalism way, there is an important thread about how we relate to, are enchanted by, and have our hearts broken by our relationships with animals: his young son’s longing for a pet snake, the delightful Barred Rock hens Comet and Snowball, the pug, and how you choose to deal with a foolish young peacock who has gulped down zinc nails and nuts and washers and a copper grommet and requires chelation, weeks of veterinary care and hours of surgery. Warning: animals die in this book.
There might be a bit more background information at more length than is strictly necessary (admirable as he may have been, several pages on Andrew Carnegie feel a bit tangential). But overall, this is a skillfully written, informative, and often moving piece of work (I read it in a day.) It also taught me that when the time comes, I think I will stick with chickens.
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