The Origin Story
The morning Luke passed, I made a point to bury him myself.
No help. I grabbed a shovel and hoped I’d find a spot that wasn’t solid rock. This is not a small hope in Central Texas, especially when you have six broken ribs.
I got lucky. I managed a hole just big enough.
I moved a cinderblock on top of his tiny grave. It was painful in every sense. How could this have happened on my watch. I was damn sure I wasn’t going to let coyotes or raccoons disturb it.
I went back inside, sat down, and started rereading every source of information I could find on the various things that can go wrong with peacocks. I read into the night about peachick health issues until my eyes were bleary, as if the answer might be hiding in the margins this time.
That’s where the phrase started forming in my head:
There are 101 ways a peafowl can die.
Not dramatically.
Not metaphorically.
Just practically.
I couldn’t let another life slip through my fingers. I decided I was going to beat the statistics, or at least know when they were beating me. If something went wrong again, I wanted to recognize it while it was happening.
So I read everything.
Bacteria. Parasites. Viruses. Injuries. All the ways things can go wrong quietly and quickly. What became clear, fast, was that peafowl do not give you much of a window. They don’t linger. They don’t wait for plans. They have a habit of just… dying on you.
At an unreasonable hour, I ordered preventative medication for the other chicks. Waiting for shipping isn’t an option. You don’t get to pause a situation and say help is on the way. If something was going to happen, it was going to happen immediately, whether you were ready or not.
As soon as packages started arriving, I started assembling a first aid kit in a box in the corner. Not because I thought I could handle everything, but because I knew there wouldn’t be time to wait once something tipped.
My regular vet wasn’t helpful in that department. That’s not an indictment. It’s just how this works.
The Most Frustrating Part Was the Information
There is no definitive source for peacock care online.
What you get instead is a lot of people, all contradicting each other, all absolutely sure they’re right.
Welcome to the internet.
At some point, you have to pick a source and mostly stay with it.
That’s When the Phrase Really Stuck
There are 101 ways for a peacock to die.
You don’t panic about it.
You don’t dramatize it.
You just accept that this is part of the job now.
Be ready.
Pay attention.
Now play ball.
If you need me, I’ll be organizing a first aid kit again and googling “how many ways peafowl can die and why people keep raising them anyway.”