Indian Peafowl

The peacock’s train is made of elongated upper-tail feathers, about 100 to 160 of them in museum specimens, each tipped with a shimmering eyespot. When a male shakes his train in display, the rustling feathers produce infrasound, low-frequency sound below 20 Hz that humans cannot hear. Researchers at the University of Manitoba found that peafowl can hear it: playback of the recordings made both peacocks and peahens more alert and active. Peafowl are the first birds shown to both make and hear infrasound. Its exact purpose is not yet clear, though it may act as a signal to females. The train is molted each year and regrown before breeding. Despite it, males can still fly, though they rarely do, usually escaping on foot, and they roost in tall trees.

Peahens are mostly brown, with a rufous-brown head, a metallic green lower neck, and whitish underparts, a far duller look than the male. That subdued color likely helps, because the female incubates the eggs alone for about 27 to 30 days in a shallow ground nest, where predators such as civets, leopards, jackals, and dholes are a constant threat. Males do not normally take part in incubation. Chicks are downy and precocial, meaning they follow their mother soon after hatching. She alone raises them for about 7 to 9 weeks, and they learn to forage by copying her. By around two months, they resemble smaller versions of the adults, and young males look much like females at first.

Indian peafowl are omnivores with a remarkably flexible diet, eating grass, seeds, flower buds, fruits, insects, and small reptiles, including snakes and lizards, and even small rodents. Termites are a favorite food, and they swallow pebbles to help grind it. In India’s Gir Forest, a large share of the diet is berries, while in the Anaikatty Hills it is mostly plant matter, with insects making up under 9 percent. They feed in open areas early in the morning, rest under cover in the midday heat, and may feed on farmland in the mornings and evenings, taking crops such as peanuts, paddy, chili peppers, and bananas. This flexibility likely helps explain why the species remains common, though humans are still its greatest threat through habitat loss and hunting.

Peafowl are famous for loud, far-carrying calls, including a harsh “pia-ow” that becomes more frequent before the monsoon, which is also when the breeding season begins. Calls double as alarms: both sexes give up to six alarm calls, and a loudly calling peafowl can signal a predator such as a tiger. Males use seven more calls during territorial disputes, and three are given only in breeding season. Although peafowl are mostly solitary outside the breeding season, they tolerate people well. Many live semi-domesticated around human habitations, sometimes nesting in building crevices, and they roost in tall trees at night, or on rocks and buildings. Protected across much of India, where the peacock is the national bird, they are among the most easily seen wild birds on the subcontinent.

Indian peafowl usually forage on the ground in small groups called musters, made up of one peacock and three to five peahens, though sources report harems of up to six. After the breeding season, the flocks are made up mainly of females and young, and outside breeding some females live alone or in groups of two or three. This structure reflects the species’ polygynous mating system, in which a single male may mate with several females within his territory. Males defend territories during the breeding season, and at night peafowl roost together in trees, where they are safer from predators such as tigers, leopards, dholes, and jackals. A male’s train is molted and regrown every year, and it can take him several years to grow a full one.

During breeding season, several males, often closely related, gather at lek sites, small display grounds where each holds a tiny territory. They perform in open, elevated spots such as fallen trees, large rocks, or even rooftops, fanning their trains for visiting peahens. Each eyespot has a purplish-black, heart-shaped center, a blue ring, and a copper rim. What females pay attention to is less obvious than it looks. One experiment found that peahens were not sensitive to the removal of up to 20 percent of a male’s eyespots, and other research suggests they respond mainly to the blue-green color of the eyespots rather than their number. Males add loud calls and infrasound, but how females use these signals is still unclear.