The peacocks have been leaving at dawn.
Not sneaking out. Not testing boundaries.
Full, deliberate, sunrise departures. All four of them. Single file. Headed straight for the neighbors’ property like they’d clocked in for a shift.
Every morning. Every single morning.
They don’t come back until nightfall.
Under normal circumstances, this would be a problem. But we’ve had construction crews on the property this week, and honestly, four opinionated peafowl wandering through a work zone was not a complication I needed to manage.
Peafowl are curious. Peafowl investigate. Peafowl will walk directly up to a stranger operating heavy equipment and stare at him like they’re conducting a safety inspection.
You would think large construction workers would not be intimidated by birds.
You would be wrong.
I have watched grown men tell me they were scared of my peacocks. These are guys who move lumber and pour concrete for a living, and they do not want to find out what Han Solo’s deal is.
For the record, my birds are perfectly nice to strangers. Friendly, even. But when a four-foot wingspan opens up three feet from your face because a bird got startled by a nail gun, “friendly” is not the word that comes to mind.
So the neighbor migration was actually convenient.
For about a week.
I missed my birds.
The Part Where Convenient Became a Problem
The birds need to stay on our property during the day. Period.
Free range does not mean free country. They have acres. They have bugs. They have everything they need right here.
But the neighbors have a flower bed.
And apparently, a flower bed is worth committing to.
Retrieving them at dusk is normally a straightforward operation. I call. They ignore me for a while. Then I make the commute — which is not a word I expected to use for birds — and they follow me home single file like they were always planning to and my yelling was simply not a factor.
Not last night.
Last night, they did not want to leave.
I walked over to see what was going on. Han, Leia, and Neo were milling around nearby.
But Morpheus was in the flower bed.
Lying down.
Not standing. Not pecking. Not doing anything that looked like a bird who was about to cooperate.
Just lying there.
The Part Where I Panicked (Briefly)
My first thought was injury.
Is she hurt. What happened. What did she get into.
I reached down, and she stood up.
She was fine. Morpheus my problem chick always give me heart attacks.
She was also covered in dirt. Not “I rolled around a little” dirty. Head to tail, covered in it. And beneath her was a perfect hollow — scooped out, shaped, deliberate.
She had made a nest.
I stood there, staring at the hollow in my neighbor’s flower bed, while the phrase formed in my head before I could stop it:
Oh no.
A Sidebar About Teenage Peafowl
Peafowl don’t reach sexual maturity until around two years old.
I knew this. I had read this. I had taken comfort in this.
I was adorable.
What the reading failed to adequately emphasize is that teenage peafowl — like teenage everything — practice.
They practice their mating dances. They practice their displays. And apparently, they practice nesting behavior.
Think of it as the peafowl equivalent of teenagers sneaking off to make out somewhere their parents can’t see them.
Except in this case, “somewhere their parents can’t see them” is the neighbor’s flower bed.
And “making out” is scooping a hollow in someone else’s dirt and sitting in it like you’ve found your forever home.
So much for having more time.
Why This Is Actually a Problem
Here’s the thing about peahens and nesting.
Once a peahen decides to sit on eggs, she commits. She leaves the nest only briefly. She does not take breaks. She sits there, on the ground, exposed, for close to a month.
Even at night.
On the ground means vulnerable. To coyotes. To foxes. To raccoons. To everything that moves through this property after dark.
This is why most people who raise peafowl pen up their hens in the spring. You contain them. You control the nesting environment. You don’t let them pick a spot in an unsecured flower bed on someone else’s property and hope for the best.
I thought I had more time to figure out how to handle this.
Morpheus is not even a year old. She’s a teenager playing house. But the instinct is already there, and the instinct does not care about my timeline.
I got them all home last night.
But as I’m writing this, I would bet money that if I walked over to the neighbors’ right now, Morpheus would be back in that flower bed.
Sitting in her hollow.
Practicing for a future I am not ready for.
If you need me, I’ll be standing in someone else’s flower bed at dusk and googling “how to explain property lines to a peahen who is not interested in property lines.”