Just when you thought The Birds was merely a Hitchcock film of the 60s and you were safe from a terrifying avian reality, you thought wrong. There’s terror afoot for the residents of a small neighborhood in Surrey, British Columbia, and it’s nothing new.
For years now, an ostentation of peacocks has called the town of Surrey home. An ostentation is a grouping of the flamboyantly feathered fowl and this particular ostentation numbers 150 of them. Being native to locales such as India and Sri Lanka, British Columbia might seem a strange place for them to make berth. When the area was a bit more rural, one man decided he was going to raise them for funsies, boosting their number from a few to 150.
Then he moved away. The peacocks, however, did not. And in the absence of their farmer, they grew wild and, as multiple reports are saying, feral. While permanent hearing loss can be caused by sounds louder than 85 decibels, the nighttime crying of peacocks may not deafen, but makes for sleepless nights for town residents. The disturbances began with noise, as the peacock mating season spans from March to October.
The noisy ostentation progressively became more invasive, staging a veritable coup. At times a literal coup, one resident of Surrey had enough and chopped down a tree that the birds had been using to roost. This earned him a $1,000 fine from the city but he shows no remorse: “The last four years, I’ve tried with the city from every possible angle. Forty-plus peacocks were going up on my roof every night.”
Another residential family became unable to use their front door when a family of feathered squatters decided that the front stoop would be the perfect place for a nest. Mind you, peacocks may be beautiful creatures, but they’re not famed for their friendliness. Now they’ve taken their aggression to a whole new level: vandalism.
Male peacocks have been attacking cars parked around the neighborhood. The culprit? Their own reflections.
“With the dark-colored cars, they can see their reflection fairly clearly, so they mistake that as another peacock and have at it. They’ll get the front panel, the side panel, the rear panel and then work around to the other side.”
Among the 11,261 plus private jets in the United States, the tired residents of Surrey wish the burdensome creatures would also take flight and leave them in peace. The resulting damage has amounted to thousands of dollars, but the solution to the problem remains a mystery. It seems that no particular department knows who, nor how, they should be handling the chaos of the vibrant ostentation. Meanwhile, residents remain flinching at each screech and sleeplessly hope their car isn’t next.
