Georgia Gardening: The peacock plant a true story, 0 by MaypopLaurel

MaypopLaurel wrote:
Well, it's late, and I didn't have a good night's sleep last night after the creature in the photo below crawled out from under the dust ruffle, but here goes...

Last summer, my DD was home between graduation and grad school, doing her summer community swim coaching gig. The house phone rang and it was DD..."Hi, Mom". "Hi, Em, how was practice?" Anyway, it went on like this for several casual sentences and then she said, "Mom, I'm out at the top of the driveway and there is a peacock walking down the road in front of the house. What should I do?" I said, "A what?" and she said , "A peacock". She then told me that she had tried to round it up out of the street and down our drive, to no avail. It was wandering around up front and broaching the road. I said keep an eye out and I'll make some calls.

I then called Fulton County Animal Control and reported the peacock in the road/yard and asked that someone come out to capture the bird and return it to its rightful owner. Now here's where the story gets interesting...

The person tells me to hold on a minute and then gets back on line and tells me that peacocks are native birds and that they do not deal with wildlife!!!LOL "ARE YOU SERIOUS!", I exclaim, "What are you talking about? This bird belongs to someone and I want you to come get it." It has now wandered down the drive and into our woods. There is more muffled conversation and the person tells me that I will be under penalty of law if I touch this native wild bird! I demanded to speak to a supervisor. A new person gets on the phone, introduces themselves as the supervisor and asks me loosely 'What's my problem?' I repeat the story. The person accuses me of being argumentative, tells me that peacocks are wild all over Georgia and warns me that I had better not do anything to endanger or impede this bird as they now have my name and address. I slammed down the phone. DD and I watched the creature stroll happily off into our woods.

The next day I'm chatting with our neighbor, who also has woods adjoining ours. I tell her the peacock story. She says, "Your kidding!" I said, "No, can you believe it?" She says "No, not that...Your kidding, Jane's (another neighbor down the street) peacock has been missing for a week! Where is it?" I said, "Last I saw it was somewhere in our woods. Tell Jane to call animal control to round it up!" LOL

Laurel