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b'Thanks to Ari for suggesting this week\'s episode, about the peacock!
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\\nFurther reading:
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\\nPeacock tail feathers shake at resonance and hold eye-spots still during courtship displays
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\\nIndian peafowls\' crests are tuned to frequencies also used in social displays
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\\nAn ocellated turkey (not a peacock but related):
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\\nAn Indian peacock male:
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\\nAn Indian peahen with chicks [photo from this site]:
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\\nClose-up of a male Indian peacock\'s crest [photo by Jatin Sindhu - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=49736186]:
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\\nA male Indian peacock with train on display [photo by Thimindu Goonatillake from Colombo, Sri Lanka - Peacock Dance, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=19395087]:
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\\nA green peacock [photo from this site]:
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\\nThe mysterious Congo peacock [photo by Terese Hart, taken from this site]:
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\\nShow transcript:
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\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.
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\\nThis week we\\u2019re going to talk about a beautiful bird that almost everyone has seen pictures of, and a lot of people might have seen in zoos and parks. It\\u2019s a suggestion by Ari, who wants to learn about the peacock!
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\\nThe name peacock is technically only used for the male bird, with the female called a peahen and the birds all together referred to as peafowl. Most people just say peacocks, though, because the male peacock has such a fabulous tail that it\\u2019s what people think of when they think of peafowl. I\\u2019m happy to report that baby peafowl are called peachicks.
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\\nThe peacock most people are familiar with is native to India, specifically called the Indian peafowl. It\\u2019s a surprisingly large bird, with a big male weighing more than 13 lbs, or 6 kg. Females are smaller. It\\u2019s the size of a wild turkey and in fact it\\u2019s related to the turkey, along with pheasants, partridges, and chickens. Back in episode 144 we talked about a bird called the ocellated turkey, a brightly colored turkey that lives in the Yucatan Peninsula, which is part of Mexico. The male\\u2019s tail feathers have the same type of colorful eyespots seen on a peacock\\u2019s tail.
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\\nBut the peacock\\u2019s tail is way bigger than any turkey\\u2019s tail. It\\u2019s called a train and most of the time it\\u2019s folded so that it\\u2019s not in the way. A big male can grow a train that\\u2019s much longer than the rest of his body, more than five feet long, or 1.5 meters. Most of the train\\u2019s elongated feathers end in a colorful eye-spot, around 200 of them in total. The eyespot pattern really does resemble a big eye, with a dark blue spot in the middle surrounded by a ring of blue-green and a bigger ring of bronze. The bronze color is surrounded by pale green and the rest of the feather is a darker green. As far as we know, the eyespots aren\\u2019t supposed to look like eyes the way some animal markings are. A leopard or other predator doesn\\u2019t attack the tail thinking it\\u2019s a peacock\\u2019s head. It\\u2019s just a pattern.
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\\nFor a long time scientists were divided as to what the peacock\\u2019s train was really used for. Not everyone thought it was for showing off for peahens. Some thought it was just for camouflage in the jungle. The main confusion was why the peacock would grow such a long, conspicuous train, which can be a hindrance to him in thick undergrowth and can attract the attention of predators.'