Mama's, don't let your peafowl grow up to be chickens

Some of you may be wondering how I'm making this blog post since I am, at this very moment, hurtling through the air towards the city of New Orleans in a pressurized steel tube where contact with the outside world is explicitly forbidden. Well, thanks to the magic of the internet (check it out if you haven't already, it's pretty awesome), I was able to set a timer so that this blog entry would post while I'm being served screwdrivers by some crusty flight attendant that will no doubt take a fancy to either me or Travis (not that I'm complaining).

Eggs by mail.

Even if I weren't going on vacation, this would be a very exciting time for The Nearly Constant Gardener. Yesterday, just after I put the finishing touches on "My soft spot for leaf-footed bugs," I received, via the US Postal Service (not bankrupt yet), a clutch of peafowl eggs.

Bubble-wrapped peafowl eggs.

I've blogged previously about our broody chicken Gloria. Not one to let a chicken in a hormonal trance go to waste, I'm putting Gloria to work hatching and raising some peafowl. 

A few aspects of this situation may strike you as odd, so let me explain.

When a chicken is broody, she stops laying eggs and tries to hatch her eggs and any other eggs she can find. She also gets really ornery and won't let any other chickens into the egg box to lay. Typically, with enough persistence you can break broodiness, but it's a pain. The instinct to be a mother is really strong in a broody chicken. For most modern breeds, broodiness has been bred out, but a few are still prone to it. The broody tendency seems to be linked to size. Big, stout breeds (the kind you look at and immediately think "Mother Hen") like Cochins and Barred Rocks still go broody. I happen to have a spare chicken coop (that's just how I roll) so it's easy for us to separate the broody hen from the others, thereby maintaining egg production from the non-broody gals.

Gloria is our second hen that goes broody every spring. Our first, the well-known and universally-loved Henrietta, actually raised two sets of chicks and a batch of ducklings in three years of foster motherhood. Until a vicious opossum killed Henrietta last fall, we had planned on using her to raise some peafowl. Luckily, Gloria seems to have the same motherly instinct.

When I tell people that I'm allowing our chicken to raise peafowl, I almost always get a puzzled look, followed by an explanation of how large and loud peacocks are. I usually respond by making a life-like (in terms of pitch, melody, and, most importantly, volume) peacock call. I am familiar with peacocks. My grandmother tried to establish a flock on her ranch, but it didn't work out. Before that, her aunt actually had a well-established colony on her ranch that I remember well from my childhood.

That's actually the purpose of these eggs. If they hatch and grow up, they are going to Wart (that's what we call my paternal grandmother, long story) and Papa to decorate their ranch.

Peafowl eggs just before going underneath Gloria.