Peacocks Ruffling Residents’ Feathers in Posh Palos Verdes

Lush trees, cozy homes and ocean breezes have put posh Palos Verdes Estates on Southern California’s best-address list, but it’s the peacocks casually strolling its streets and backyards that make it unique.

The city has adopted the spectacular peafowl as a sort of informal mascot, immortalizing its likeness and name on stained-glass windows and in shopping malls.

But not everyone loves the spectacularly feathered birds, and as a result their numbers are dwindling. Some say their neighbors are poisoning the peacocks.

Soon the city will do a peacock census--as formal a head-count as the strutting birds will allow--to determine how best the flock can be thinned to more manageable proportions by trapping and trucking some birds to a wildlife sanctuary.

But the pro-peacock faction is mourning. Many residents, like Jane and Carl Allen, have grown especially fond of the birds that frequent their yards. Some birdwatchers have given names to their favorites.

Cats Share Food

“I just love them,” said Jane Allen, whose cats share their food with the peacocks each morning.

“They line up in my yard in the morning if I don’t wake up in time to give them their breakfast. When I open the curtains there will be four or five peacock faces lined up, looking at me.”

The Allens watched in awe as their favorite peacocks, Kate and George, raised a family in their yard.

“The babies grew up here and slept in my pine tree,” Jane Allen said. “Kate taught them how to fly here. I hate to think Kate and George might not be back.”

The trapping plan was first hatched last year when some residents began complaining that the prosperous peafowl--brought to Palos Verdes Estates in 1923 from upstate New York by city planner Frank Vanderlip to beautify the new community--were creating a nuisance with their noise and droppings.

Trapping Order Suspended

Carl Allen and other peafowl lovers formed Friends of the Peacocks and took up arms by filing suit to stop the trapping. More than 50 birds had already been caged and removed, but the group won a court order suspending the trapping until the city completed an environmental study.

It was when the trapping stopped that the deaths started. A dozen peacocks were found dead with high levels of arsenic in their bodies in an area where citizens had complained that the birds damaged property and were especially noisy.

“I’m beginning to hate the human animal,” Jane Allen said, recalling the spate of poisonings.

The city and the Friends of the Peacocks eventually compromised in a plan that would permit the flocks to be thinned without exterminating the peafowl. According to the current city proposal, birds would be trapped and relocated in a wildlife sanctuary only when residents complained, but a minimum of 25 peacocks must be maintained in the city.

Figure Could Be Revised

That figure may be revised by the outcome of the city census and a second study to determine the optimum flock size and gender ratio to best preserve the peafowl population.

Friends of the Peacocks member Gar Goodson said the peafowl lovers favor the trapping program but think 25 is too few birds to ensure the survival of the flocks in the face of disease, accident or “fowlicide.”

Goodson grows sad at the thought that his favorite peacock--Fred--might someday be trucked away in a cage. Many times during spring mating season, Goodson said, he has watched Fred try to woo a female in the peacock’s trademark display of iridescent blue and green tail feathers.

“He hops and preens and shivers with those feathers spread out,” Goodson said. “For the most part, the females ignore him but he is pretty impressive.”

Even City Manager Gordon Siebert, who has had to implement the trapping plans, likes the peacocks. But he says the issue is compromise for overall community harmony.

“I happen to like peafowl,” he said. “I grew up with them. My aunt had a farm on the East Coast and I used to trail them around and pick up their tail feathers.

“But I also respect the wishes of the residents who feel they’re a nuisance.”