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Thursday February 9, 2017

Who said romance was dead?


Preening peacocks and happy endings!

When a lonesome peacock flitted into our garden some months ago, we assumed it would flit off again but no, it decided to stay.

It was probably happy to find itself in a tranquil wonderland of trees and chirpy hens with corn fed several times a day. All was well for a while but when Jeronimo (for that was what we christened him) began to pursue our hens, much to their distaste and that of the cockerels, we knew we had to find him a mate. Every morning he’d fan out his beautiful shimmering feathers and stagger under their weight as he attempted to attract admiring glances from our clucking hens.

Quite frankly it became a pitiful spectacle so I asked in my weekly column of the Majorca Daily Bulletin whether any reader knew of a lonely peahen. I wrote it part in jest but to my delight, reader Terry, contacted me to say he had such a creature in his garden. She had arrived from nowhere and seemed to have nowhere to go.

Some weeks later we hatched a plan and Terry made a special pen in which to transport the peahen to our home. It was a wild and rainy day but Josephine (her new name!) quickly took refuge in our pool room and waited for the skies to clear. There was no sign of Jeronimo and so it was an anxious wait for us all.

The next morning I found the two touching beaks and walking together through the orchards. A touching and romantic sight! Now they sleep together in the pool room and saunter about the gardens during the day, often making voyeuristic forays on to the roof to peer into our bedroom or perching on the kitchen windowsills. They honk and coo in the morning and strut their stuff around the terrain, proving that they are very much king and queen of the crop.

We live in troubled times but thanks to Jeronimo and his Josephine, i can still believe in happy endings.



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