Whence
Peacock (Indian peafowl)
Animal

Where does Peacock (Indian peafowl) come from?

The Indian peafowl comes from the Indian subcontinent, where it still lives wild across most of India and Sri Lanka. The male, the peacock, is India's national bird, and his shimmering train has puzzled scientists since Charles Darwin.

A bird of India and Sri Lanka

The Indian peafowl is native to the Indian subcontinent. It lives across most of India, from the Indus valley in the north-west to Assam in the north-east and from the Himalayas to the southern tip, and in the drier lowlands of Sri Lanka. It likes open forest, bushy country near water and farmland. Small groups, usually one peacock with three to five peahens, feed on the ground on seeds, fruit, insects and small reptiles, then fly up into tall trees to roost.

West to Athens and beyond

People carried peafowl far from home long ago, and the birds had reached Athens by 450 BCE. Latin called the bird pavo, the source of Old English pawa, and the English word peacock appears around 1300. In medieval Europe peacocks were kept in menageries and in the gardens of great estates, and knights decorated their helmets with the plumes. Today feral flocks live in many parts of the world, and zoos, parks and bird-fanciers keep breeding birds.

The train that puzzled Darwin

The peacock's famous 'tail' is a train of extra-long feathers, the upper tail coverts, which grow from the rump over his real tail. Around 200 of them, most tipped with an eyespot, are raised and quivered in a fan to court peahens. Their colours come from tiny, regular structures in the feather barbules that reflect particular colours of light, not from pigment. Darwin could see no use in such a burden and wrote that the sight of a peacock's feather made him sick. His answer, sexual selection, is still debated.

Sources: en.wikipedia.org ↗ · knowindia.india.gov.in ↗ · pnas.org ↗ · etymonline.com ↗

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