Peacock

This is from yesterday morning, pulling fence to set up again for the sheep. The peacock (who doesn't have a name yet, sadly - I would take suggestions...he needs a fancy one, obviously - the turkey's name was Horatio, like the CSI Miami sunglasses meme guy) likes to follow me around everywhere while I am doing projects outside, silly boy 😂

I hatched him from an egg I got from one of my farm sitting jobs - I tried to hatch a bunch of them, but he was the only one who made it. Apparently the odds were hugely stacked against his (and my) favor, because I was using a beat up old styrofoam incubator from a couple decades ago that doesn't have a built in thermometer or humidity gauge and it's full of holes so it takes constant fiddling to maintain any kind of consistent environment in there for the duration of incubation. The power went out at least once, as well - I thought that would kill them for sure.

The lady I got the eggs from told me afterwards that other peacock breeders swear that you cannot hatch pea eggs in cheap styrofoam incubators at all, let alone an old beat up one - they normally use the high dollar climate controlled ones that look like a wine fridge with an automatic egg turner - fancy people raising fancy stock, the problem with that is they are generally a lot more weak when you coddle them so much. The other chicks I got from her to keep him company died of various ailments after a short amount of time because they were not as tough as he is - they were coddled. It doesn't do them any good in the long run.

When he was little, I had to keep him in a cage in the barn to keep him safe from predators - since he was the only one that hatched, he was pretty special and I wanted to make darn sure he made it to adulthood. Now, he's a pretty big bird and he can go all over wherever he wants, but he chooses to stay here and follow me around.