Screeches Give Way to Political Standoff in Peacocks’ Domain

The low point in Lucy Anderson’s battle with the peacocks came after she raced outside to shoo one of the big, gaudy birds from her front doorstep.

It was bad enough that she fell and broke her hip. But the pain of that accident became all the worse when she returned from the hospital, hobbling behind a walker, and opened the house for some air.

Inside stepped a peacock.

Nothing Anderson could do could get the bird--a part of the wild fauna on the rugged Palos Verdes Peninsula--to return to the outdoors. Its beady black eyes gleaming, the ungainly fowl led the hobbling Anderson from one piece of furniture to the next, taunting her, mocking her. The scene was not over until she had called in the Fire Department.

Strange Interlude

“I can’t remember how many firemen came, all dressed in their yellow slickers, hats and gloves, to get this peacock out of the house,” Anderson recalled. “It would jump up on the table and back down . . . acting strange, looking really crazy.”

Such are life’s little hazards on the picturesque Palos Verdes hillsides, an affluent, semi-rustic area of ocean views and brushy foliage. It is one of the few places in California where peacocks roam freely, even defiantly.

In past years, the exotic, royal-blue birds--technically, “peafowl”--were the dominant issue in otherwise tranquil neighborhoods. They screeched, left droppings everywhere and wolfed down garden flowers like so much chicken feed.

Pro- and anti-peacock factions clashed bitterly three years ago in Palos Verdes Estates. Lawsuits were filed, judgments won. Peacocks were surreptitiously poisoned. City Council meetings stretched far into the night, attended by residents bedecked with peacock feathers, as elected officials scratched for answers.

Finally, though, there seems to be evolving an uneasy peace with the birds. Hostilities have eased on the winding streets where children sell peacock feathers for $1 and where lavish homes are tastefully decorated with brass peacocks and china plates of limited-edition peacock designs.

Palos Verdes Estates, with 15,000 human residents, now boasts a peacock management plan that has gone far toward smoothing the ruffled feathers. Under the plan, a thinner peacock population--reduced by trapping and relocation--has held steady in number over the last two winters. And the current spring mating season is nearly over with almost none of the usual outcry over high-pitched peacock screeching.

“There hasn’t been a squawk,” crows Council member Ruth Gralow.

The question now is whether the delicate truce will hold. The egg-hatching season begins again this month and all eyes are alert for population changes. A swing one way or another, even a few extra birds in the wrong place, could start the whole flap going once more.

“You’ll hear the anti-peacockers and the pro-peacockers go at it again,” predicted Ron Florance, a former mayor. “It flares up about every five years, from what I’ve seen.”

The plan’s aim is to preserve the birds as a part of community culture and history, but not as a never-ending nuisance. It is a lofty goal, according to many. For every peacock lover, enchanted by the birds’ glorious beauty, there seems to be a detractor, like Anderson, who claims to know their truer colors.

Emotional Issue

“Such sinister things,” she still huffs, as if talking about creatures from Grimms’. “Their wingspread is just enormous. Their claws are just terrible! “

Emotions are always just below the surface. In wooded tracts where the the birds scurry from cars and dogs, some residents like Julian Christiansen like to feed them. They flock to Christiansen’s driveway seven or eight at a time.

“We’ve got a neighbor who’s going to sue me,” he said.

When Michael T. Williams was running for the City Council in April, it was noted that he was once the attorney for Friends of the Peacocks. He would later lose the election badly.

“Somebody down the street said it was terrible I was running for the City Council, that I was such a rookie,” Williams recalled. “I know why she said it, because I was for the peafowl. People still carry some big crosses on this thing.”

Although fewer now, the birds are still a striking presence. They number anywhere from a couple of hundred to nearly 1,000 on the peninsula--no one is sure. They nest in the thick brush and spend their waking hours roosting in trees or on rooftops and sometimes patrolling their small neighborhoods. Often they take to the roofs before dawn, playing and scampering like 20-pound mice.

Not at All Afraid

“They don’t seem to be intimidated or fearful of human beings at all,” said Terry Belanger, city manager of Rolling Hills. “They sort of swagger down the street saying, ‘Get out of my way.’ ”

Belanger recalled one recent complaint about a peacock that kept pecking on a patio window, seemingly determined to come in from the yard. The woman who reported the problem was holding off the bird from inside, like a Hitchcock heroine. The crazy thing had harassed her more than once, she reported.

“She was afraid it would break the window,” the city manager said. “As as she talking on the phone, you could hear the screech and the peck, peck, peck, peck on the window pane.”

Peninsula lore is filled with misdeeds of eccentric peafowl. Cora Lee Brannon, a nine-year resident of Espinosa Circle, a noted peacock area in Palos Verdes Estates, cited cases of damaged furnishings and ruined wallpaper from peacocks that panicked after entering homes, often through open windows.

Brannon, a gardening enthusiast, became an anti-peacock activist soon after trying to replant her yard. She ended up with, among other things, broken azaleas and missing bulbs. “They’re very hard on impatiens,” Brannon observed.

Even more complaints involve the peacock mating cry, a screech that can send chills down the spine: “HeeeeeeEEEElp!”

Fearful Sounds

“Blood-curdling” is how Belanger describes it. “It sounds like somebody’s got ahold of somebody’s throat and is throttling them.”

Newcomers to the peninsula often hear that sound and make urgent calls to police, said Capt. Mike Tracy, a 20-year veteran of the Palos Verdes Estates Police Department. Such calls, he said, are usually false alarms.

But not necessarily.

“Years ago, we had a lieutenant working graveyard (shift) and a man called in about a woman screaming for help,” Tracy said. “The lieutenant said, ‘It’s probably a peacock.’ And the caller said, ‘Yeah, but this peacock is saying, “ Please help!” ’ “

The shrill cry once held some usefulness for humans, bird experts said. The birds, natives of India, have been venerated there since Biblical times, said Martin G. Rigby, an amateur ornithologist who has studied the Palos Verdes population.

Indian villagers used the birds to sound an alert over approaching lions or tigers. Even now the birds, a sort of town crier, are considered sacred in that part of the world, Rigby said.

The popularity of the birds spread throughout the Far East before they were imported to America, probably for display in zoos, sometime in the early 1800s. Those in Palos Verdes are the India blue variety, one of at least five distinct species, Rigby said.

The brightly colored males, true peacocks, grow to lengths up to seven feet, including the long train of tail feathers. The smaller, brownish females, or “pea hens,” reach about four feet.

Mating Signals

In the spring, males display their brilliant tail feathers to attract mates. Until the feathers fall out, in August, they give the birds a jet-like appearance as they swoop down in long arcs from the trees.

“They’ll glide for two blocks,” Police Capt. Tracy said. “We’ll say, ‘Here comes a P-38,’ meaning a female, or, ‘Here comes a 747,’ meaning a male. They don’t fly real far. They take off like a goose, running with their wings out.”

Peafowl first appeared on the peninsula in 1916, after Frank Vanderlip Sr., a New York financier who was assistant Secretary of the Treasury under President McKinley, purchased 16,000 acres that he would later develop into Palos Verdes Estates.

Fresh from building a new hillside home, which still overlooks Portuguese Bend, Vanderlip welcomed a guest: Anita Baldwin, the daughter of famed developer Elias Jackson (Lucky) Baldwin. She complained that the desolate hills were too quiet and she gave Vanderlip nine healthy peafowl, thus ending the silence problem for good.

“They kept multiplying, and God knows how many there are now,” said John Vanderlip, 72, a son of the early developer.

At first the birds were a drawing card--the best neighborhoods had them. A powerful lobbyist was said to be Edna Roessler, the wife of Fred H. B. Roessler, the first mayor of Palos Verdes Estates. The forceful woman, with her horn-rim glasses and long cigarette holder, watched over a growing family of the birds in the 1940s and 1950s and did her best to shape public opinion, according to ornithologist Rigby.

Symbol of Status

“She’d ask you point blank: ‘Do you like peacocks?’ ” the local scholar said. “And you’d better answer ‘yes’ if you wanted to be friends with the mayor’s wife.”

More recently, however, the peninsula seemed to be running out of room. New urbanites and birds went head to tufted head. No one worried about tigers, but the sound of a Jaguar door slamming at 2 in the morning was sure to have the peacocks screaming.

“They’ll crow for 10 to 15 minutes,” said bird-lover Williams, who added: “I find it no more distracting than a dog barking or listening to a jet cruise out of LAX.”

The wars became a part of peninsula history. Even now, in scrap books and old folders, residents preserve bits of that wild time. Florance, presiding over late-night meetings in Palos Verdes Estates, occasionally would cast his vote with a peacock warble. The newspapers could usually get a comment out of Harry Peacock, then the city manager of Rolling Hills Estates.

When the council agreed to allow trapping and removal of the birds, bird lovers won a court order to stop it. “They wanted to treat the peacocks like chickens,” one resident complained. Clearly, the court agreed, they were not chickens.

Compromise Reached

There were months of study, led by an ad hoc peacock committee, and finally the compromise plan. The city reduced the peacock population by about half, removing them to a large ranch near San Diego and to the Wildlife Way Station, a private animal preserve in Tujunga. And now, under the plan, residents may trap and relocate annoying birds anytime the yearly census shows they have exceeded the target numbers.

No one is exactly happy, but the mood has lightened. As former Mayor Florance stepped down in April, his colleagues gave him a gift--a peacock. The bird was then released into the hills, with Florance’s name on its leg band.

“The first two comments he made were unprintable,” Councilwoman Ruth Gralow recalled. “But now, whenever we hear a squawking up in the hills, we can look up there and say, ‘Shut up, Ron!’ ”