As far back as I can remember, I’ve never gotten along very well with birds. With the exception of the occasional Cornish game hen with wild rice dressing, nearly every relationship I’ve ever had with a member of the avian family has ultimately gone fowl.
My problems started with Pretty Boy, the first in a series of doomed parakeets my parents bought for my brothers and me in the early 1960s. Actuarial tables call for parakeets to live about seven to ten years, but in my house they rarely lasted that long; typically they enjoyed a life span comparable to that of a head of iceberg lettuce. For a while we took to replacing each Pretty Boy, naming all the subsequent birds Pretty Boy as well, on the theory that it was tough to get too attached to a pet you would miss altogether if you spent a long afternoon out of the house. Nobody knew why our parakeets never survived, though I suspected the deaths were self-inflicted, the result of living in a home with four boys under the age of ten. This suspicion was eventually confirmed when the last three Pretty Boys left notes.
After a time we decided to try our luck with canaries, buying a bright yellow, highly musical bird we named Elvis. Elvis thrived in our home for several years, until one day he escaped from his cage, using the wily ruse of flying out the little door when I accidentally left it open overnight. The next afternoon, while barnstorming an aunt’s bouffant, Elvis snagged and broke his right foot. My brothers and I took it upon ourselves to fix him up, using a tiny, tiny Popsicle-stick splint and a tiny, tiny strip of Band-Aid. Unfortunately, this treatment didn’t cause the broken foot to heal, but to, well, fall off. Had Elvis had access to legal counsel, he would no doubt have filed a tiny, tiny lawsuit. Instead he just grew old and bitter, developed a nasty Budgie Biscuit habit, and eventually gave up singing altogether except at the occasional benefit.
I hadn’t thought about Elvis or the parade of Pretty Boys in years, until a few months ago, when I received an invitation in the mail to visit the country’s largest--nay, only--peacock farm, located in the little town of Minden, Iowa. The mailing described the Iowa Peacock Farm as a sort of four-acre fowl factory that for years has been turning out live birds and fertilized eggs for the nation’s growing band of peacock keepers. According to the letter, the husband and wife co-birders who run the place- -Dennis Fett and Debra Buck--had sold their product in nearly every state in the union, had appeared on numerous afternoon talk shows, and had written two peacock books and one peacock song (Peacocks can be happy,/ peacocks can be wacky./ They shake their tails/ and display for their girls./ Wacky, wacky, oh so wacky,/ happy, happy, always happy. / They are wacky all the day long). They even publish a bimonthly newsletter that includes an advice column entitled Ask Mr. Peacock.
