The peacocks that divided a B.C. town

Clip You’re listening to a Frequency Podcast Network production in association with CityNews.

Jordan So, peacocks? beautiful birds, always a special site, a welcome addition to any neighbourhood or town. As you may have guessed, peacocks are not native to anywhere in Canada, and they are especially not native to a small BC town where one of them just kind of showed up one day with her chicks, and then she had more chicks And soon the peacock became a part of this town’s identity. After all, they were unique, they were special. They brought a little slice of loveliness to a small town. Okay, so maybe not everyone loved the peacocks. In fact, a lot of people really, really didn’t like them at all. But those who did loved them to pieces. And this is what happened. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is the big story. Lyndsie Bourgon is a writer, an oral historian, and a 2018 National Geographic explorer who wrote the story of the peacocks and the small town for the Walrus. Hi, Lindsay.

Lyndsie Bourgon Hi, Jordan.

Jordan Why don’t we just start this way back at the beginning? Tell me about Pearl. Who is Pearl?

Lyndsie Bourgon Hi, Jordan. Sure. So Pearl is a peacock that lived for some time in the town of Naramata, BC. And she’s named Pearl because of her colouring. So we tend to think of peacocks as these kinds of rich green and maybe sapphire-coloured birds. But Pearl was white. She was entirely white, and that’s where her name came from. Pearl’s origin story in the town of Naramata is a little bit contested, but from around 2007, on appeared on the streets of Naramata and had chicks while she was there and those chicks in her ended up being the kind of wildfowl that roamed the streets of this town and became quite iconic.

Jordan Tell me a little bit about Naramata first. What kind of town is it? Where is it? I’d never heard of it until I read this story.

Lyndsie Bourgon Hi, Jordan. Sure. So Naramata is in the Okanagan of British Columbia, I believe is on Lake Kelowna. And at one point, it was on the opposite side of the lake that had become really very kind of tourism infested and so it was very small. It was a town where a lot of small orchard farmers or orchard keepers lived near, and it has a kind of quirky personality. It really attracted artists and there was kind of like a hippie movement in Southern BC. And a lot of folks ended up living out there and living off the land. And for many, many years, it was kind of the more affordable region of the Okanagan to live in. So that’s kind of where we find ourselves with this story.

Jordan And so Pearl shows up somehow in Naramata and settles down and has a herd, litter, a flock, a murder. What do you call a bunch of peacocks?

Lyndsie Bourgon I believe you call them a flock. She had kind of two rounds of chicks, and when she first showed up, there were already some chicks with her and then there was another round that came kind of a couple of years later. And so eventually the kind of small brood that was roaming the streets of three or four peacocks was expanding to be kind of like seven or eight. And peacocks are very beautiful and they’re very cool to see, especially kind of outside the context of which we might all be used to seeing them in a zoo. And they wandered the streets of Naramata and they would kind of unruffle their tail feathers and put on a show. But they also were becoming a nuisance.

Jordan So tell me, I guess you can tell me about the nuisance, but also, just maybe when they first showed up, you mentioned this town already kind of has a quirky personality. How did the town react to having this flock of peacocks? Foul? I got that right, I think, living amongst them.

Lyndsie Bourgon At first, it was kind of a mystery. So there were lots of stories kind of going around in terms of how they arrived. There were rumours around if they had come off a nearby ranch or if someone had left them behind. And at first, it was a fun thing. It was something that ended up becoming very integral to the town’s identity and even their marketing. So there are businesses in the town that put peacocks on their mugs, their travel mugs, their stickers, things like that. But not everyone was on board, particularly because peacocks can cause some property damage, which they began to do.

Jordan Tell us about that. What kinds of stuff do they do? Because when you ask me to picture birds being a nuisance, I picture, like, geese right, Which poop everywhere, but other than that, don’t really go crazy. But what do peacocks do?

Lyndsie Bourgon Yeah, peacocks are attracted to shiny things, so they will often perch on top of cars. And to get up there, they have these really kind of nasty long talons that they would dig into the car and leave these deep scratches on people’s vehicles. They would roost on top of vehicles and then people couldn’t get in the vehicle because the bird was feeling perhaps territorial and kind of warning people to back off when they arrived. They eat flowers and would kind of go through and destroy gardens wherever they felt entitled to go. They, on the ground a little bit more. They chased vehicles, they’re quite loud. They don’t have a very pleasant scream or call and they were just for a certain percentage of the people in Naramata, they were an annoyance rather than something delightful. But for another group of people, they were just really beloved. And so what ended up happening was you had folks that would keep their back gates open so that the birds could come in and they built them like places to sleep in the winter. Some people were known to feed the peacocks. The peacocks ended up having a sort of regular kind of nomadic rounds that they would make, where they’d go from one house to another. And they knew the houses that fed them and they knew the houses that had sheltered places to sleep. And so there was eventually a little bit of headbutting in the community around how these peacocks should be treated.

Jordan What happens in a community when peacocks are like the peacocks are one thing and they’re the funny part of this story, but when something that becomes integral to a small community is incredibly divisive, right? You’ve got probably neighbours, one of whom is feeding the peacocks and the other who wants to shoot them.

Lyndsie Bourgon Yes, exactly.

Jordan What does that do to a town?

Lyndsie Bourgon Naramata is a very peaceful place, but in that sense, I think perhaps the kind of disagreements were quiet disagreements that ended up building up over time. Rather than there being kind of like large-scale meetings, there were a few public meetings that were held about the birds in which people argued one way or another that they had become part of the identity of the town. There were some people had gone as far as to say that they loved the peacocks as much as they love their own pets and their own children and that if anything had happened to them, they would just be completely heartbroken. And then it all kind of came to a head with Pearl and her three chicks in 2014.

Jordan So this has been going on for like six or seven years at this point.

Lyndsie Bourgon Yeah, it went on for quite some time. A property owner, the birds had been on his land leaving, droppings, being loud, and he took it in well, we don’t know who it was, actually. So they took it into their own hands and hired a local trapper in this fellow’s yard or this person’s yard. The trapper set up a large-scale peacock trap and trapped Pearl and her chicks within it. And those birds were then moved to a petting zoo, which was in, it was pretty far outside the narrative, actually, and it was in another town and it was kind of a privately run petting zoo.

Jordan What happened when the rest of the town found out that Pearl had been spirited away?

Lyndsie Bourgon People were very angry about this because the decision had not been made as a community at all. It had been made in terms of a private citizen who took it upon themselves. The interesting thing is that there are some questions as to if peacocks are a wild animal, like, who owned them, actually was really the question there and the thing is that nobody does own them. Peacocks are also not part of the wildlife that’s listed within, for instance, like a conservation officer’s job. They tend to focus more on traditional British Columbia wildlife, like bears and even geese, things like that. So the conservation officer, the CO, it was not their job to handle the peacock. It ended up coming down to someone who just got so frustrated one day that they took it into their hands to do it.

Jordan Just because you mentioned it. I was going to ask you, so where do peacocks come from? They’re not native to BC, I suppose.

Lyndsie Bourgon No. They are native to Southeast Asia. They are quite powerful symbols. I think the peacock is India’s national bird and they really have a lot of symbolism there. And so they’re introduced over here, usually again by private landowners who want to have them be kind of part of their estates. And so there’s lots of similar drama to this throughout North America, in California in particular, there are a lot of properties, often with mansions, quite large properties that might have peacocks on them. And it’s not uncommon for one person to leave. The peacocks get left behind or they are released into the streets and they just kind of take over from there. I think there’s a very famous case of Hugh Hefner had some peacocks that were at the Playboy Ranch and they were set loose and ended up taking over the streets.

Jordan So this person who just took the law into his own hands and trapped the birds actually ended up independently, sort of putting this I’m not going to call it a peacock crisis, that sounds weird, but putting this issue to bed,

Lyndsie Bourgon Yes.

Jordan If anybody ever wanted to know what the connection between Naramatabis and the Playboy Mansion was, we’ve solved it for them. So this person traps Pearl and some chicks take them to the petting zoo. The people that love the peacocks in town flip out. What happens next?

Lyndsie Bourgon Well, some people went to the petting zoo to check in on the birds. They were that worried. The petting zoo at the time said that they were receiving way too many calls from people from Naramata that were calling about these birds and they just wanted people to be assured that the birds were being taken care of. And a public meeting was then held a little bit later because two male peacocks had remained in the town. And the thought behind this was that there were two males, they could not reproduce and for whatever reason, they were not trapped at that time. And they ended up being named Peter and Kevin in the town, informally, and they stuck around and they became kind of the focus of the town’s kind of peacock love after all of this. Whereas before it had really been Pearl. It was quite a loaded topic for many people.

Jordan So what happened to Peter and Kevin? They got to just keep chilling out and live out their days in peace?

Lyndsie Bourgon Well, they put the issue of the expanding population to bed. They were still peacocks left behind, they were still causing damage and being noisy and essentially still following along the same path that had been kind of trod before them. But the issue of more chicks coming every year was then gone. They became one of them became quite iconic for roosting in a pond arose a pine near the public library and they remained kind of around town. They would go to the cafe and sometimes they unruffled their feathers in front of the window and there were a lot of people wondering if they knew what they were doing, if they did it there on purpose. They would chase the garbage trucks every Thursday. And so they had their routine. Kevin and Peter.

Jordan Are they still there now?

Lyndsie Bourgon They are not. So in January of this year, there was sort of a tragedy around these peacocks, where one day in the middle of the winter, someone posted kind of as you do on the community Facebook page, saying, I believe that it was a hotel owner or an inn owner. And they had arrived and noticed quite a bit of blood and some feathers on their patio and it appeared that one of the birds was gone, had been killed, most likely by a bobcat, they think.

Jordan Which one? Do we know?

Lyndsie Bourgon They weren’t sure. But at first, I think the first kind of sighting was Peter, and then nobody had seen Kevin either. And so rumours were kind of floating around like, were both of the peacocks gone? And it seems that, yes, they have both been. They’ve both disappeared from the town of Naramata.

Jordan That is kind of a sad ending. It is. What happened to all the merchandise? Do they still sell peacock merchandise? Is the peacock still a big part of the town’s identity, even though there are no actual live peacocks?

Lyndsie Bourgon Yeah, it’s a good question. I have not been down there to ask. I definitely think they do. I think that became part of the kind of design of the town and people were heartbroken. There were a lot of people that really relied on these birds for a certain amount of whimsy in their day and connection to where they lived and the birds are no longer there to provide that. So many, many people felt really sad.

Jordan Are they going to go get more?

Lyndsie Bourgon My understanding is no. But also, who knows? Who knows if somebody goes out and gets one and it just shows up, just like Pearl did? Yep, exactly. Because at one point in between 2014 and when this kind of tragedy came about, there were some new peacocks that appeared in town at one point and they were very quickly ushered away. Kevin and Peter were allowed to remain. There had been a sort of day taunt around, keeping.

Jordan They were grandfathered in.

Lyndsie Bourgon Yes, exactly. But these new birds were very quickly taken to a petting zoo as well. Time will tell if people reintroduce the birds to Naramata, my kind of intuition is that it may not happen. I don’t think anyone would want to be caught doing that, which may be more likely these days.

Jordan Lyndsie, much like the town of Naramata. I rely on stories like these for a little bit of whimsy in the midst of all the news we cover. So thank you so much for sharing it with us.

Lyndsie Bourgon Thank you very much for asking me about it.

Jordan Lyndsie Bourgon bringing a little slice of whimsy to The Big Story. You can find us at thebigstorypodcast.ca. I don’t know if you’d find any episodes on that website quite like this one. You can talk to us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. You can email us if you have stories like this peacock story, we would love to hear about them. The address is [click here!], and you can call and leave us a message and play us those peacock sounds, 416-935-5935. You can find this podcast wherever you want to guest item. If you find it in a place that lets you review it, please do so, even if you hate us. All publicity is good publicity in podcast land. Thank you for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow. Back to top of page