Booked Into the Peafowl Penitentiary

The newest inmates at the Palos Verdes Estates Police Department have feathers, like cat food and enjoy a refreshing mist when they can get one.

They are wild peacocks and, as of Thursday, 46 of them were incarcerated in a temporary holding pen assembled outside the Police Department, the latest catches in a peafowl roundup that’s been going on in Palos Verdes Estates for 15 years. This is the first year neighboring Rancho Palos Verdes has launched a peafowl wrangling operation of its own.

Responding to residents’ complaints, both cities have set up traps, hoping to capture their target of 50 birds each.

Since their first perch on the Palos Verdes Peninsula decades ago, peafowl have competed with a local development boom that pushed them from open fields to rooftops in residential neighborhoods. Residents either love them or hate them.

On Thursday, some of the feathered prisoners romped around their tent-covered pen, loose feathers floating in the air. Others squeezed next to one another for warmth on the slightly cool, foggy day.

Their jailer is a tender one. Peter Tepus, Palos Verdes Estates senior maintenance worker, who has been helping out with the trappings for 15 years, washes the birds’ food bowls, mists them with water on hot days, talks to them softly, and even holds some of them.

“Calm down, girl,” he told one Thursday.

Palos Verdes Estates has 120 peafowl, the formal name for peacocks and peahens. There are 157 in Rancho Palos Verdes.

Francine A. Bradley, a poultry expert from UC Davis, along with a student assistant, guided area authorities in the trappings, setting up four traps in each city.

The complaints against the birds are legion. Beheaded flowers, squashed shrubbery, cracked car paint--they look in windshields to study their reflections--and the all-too-familiar “eeh-ooh” screams at night.

Some residents say the delinquent birds harass them. Espinosa Circle resident Dorothy Acciani says that an elderly peacock near her neighbors’ home even holds them hostage.

The peacock will perch on the handrail of the front steps and won’t go away even when he’s shooed. These residents keep a bat next to the front door. They have a water hose handy to chase them away.

One peacock even took a bite out of Acciani’s husband, Robert, when they were setting up one of the traps.

“In City Hall they give you a pamphlet on how to ‘live with your feathered friends,’ ” Acciani said. “They are not my friends.”

But they are friends to others.

As authorities checked traps Thursday, Marina Raikhel stormed out of her house in the cul-de-sac of Via Descano yelling, “What are you doing?”

She said that in the eyes of her two little girls, who trailed along, the peacocks weren’t a nuisance. They were pets.

“Look at what they are doing to the children!” said Raikhel. As the girls cried, one clutched a white teddy bear. “[The birds] live here. They belong.”

Raikhel’s sister Gala hurried over to the white pickup truck that held cages with peahens (used to lure peacocks into traps). Gala threatened to set them free but stepped away from the truck as Tepus explained that the city was just trying to keep the birds from overpopulating the suburb.

The actual trapping is much less dramatic. It’s more like a staring contest, in which those trapping wait and watch and those being trapped wait and watch too.

The traps were set up two weeks ago, baited with such treats as cat food and cereal. The traps were not sprung to let the birds grow accustomed to the cages.

To further calm the birds, homeowners baiting the cages always wear blue lab coats. The familiar color may help the birds to lose their caution and enter the cages.

Once captured, the peafowl will be shipped off to families who want to adopt them in California and even to a ranch in Colorado.

One of the peafowl recipients, Arthur Diaz of Riverside, says he doesn’t mind the inconveniences the birds bring. When officials asked him to adopt the peafowl, he was happy to oblige. At his one-acre ranch, he already had 50.

At first, he said, he was asked if he wanted to take all the captured birds, but then other prospective adopters came forward.

“I understand if other people want to adopt [too],” he said. “I didn’t want to be greedy.”