Arcadia Peacock with Expensive Taste Ransacks Liquor Store
A rowdy peacock caused hundreds of dollars in damage to an Arcadia liquor store before an animal control officer finally managed to eject the bird.
The female peacock, known as a peahen, strolled into Royal Oaks Liquor Store on North First Avenue Monday, according to the Associated Press.
Manager Rani Ghanem apparently didn’t notice the bird until a customer asked him in Spanish about the “pollo,” or chicken, the wire service reported.
Unsure of what to do next, the 21-year-old college student called animal control and an officer arrived with a net — and that’s when the real destruction began. As soon as the peahen felt the net, it began jumping and flapping violently across a table packed with bottles, sending many crashing to the ground.
Eventually, Ghanem helped the officer lift the bird and carry it out of the store.
$500 Worth of Damage
Ghanem, whose family owns the store, estimates the losses to be roughly $500.
“Yeah, he’s got expensive taste,” Ghanem joked. “I’m like, ‘You break, you buy, dude.’ But clearly he didn’t. He got away with it.”
Animal control officials said the bird would be released at the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden on Baldwin Avenue, City News Service reported.
Peafowl, which are common to the area and protected by law, are a source of beauty to some and a nuisance to others. The colorful – and noisy – birds are also notorious garden thieves known to leave droppings on driveways and occasionally attack cars’ shiny fenders, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Arcadia’a Famed Fowl
Today, hundreds of colorful peacocks, and drabber female peahens, roam the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden in Arcadia and surrounding neighborhoods. The high-volume birds are a source of joy to some and consternation to others, yet they all trace back to a few fowl Baldwin picked up on a trip to India around 1880.
In 1875, Arcadia’s founder, Elias “Lucky” Baldwin purchased about 8,000 acres of land then known as Rancho Santa Anita for $200,000 and made it his home. He planted acres of fruit trees and grapevines and raised sheep, cattle, hogs and horses.
No one knows the exact number of peafowl Baldwin imported from India, but by the 1880s “there were some 50 of them on the ranch,” says Sandy Snider, a local historian and the co-author of “Arcadia: Where Ranch and City Meet.”
At least one source credits Baldwin with being the first to bring this exotic creature to the continental United States.
Peafowl may seem an odd choice for a ranch, but they were actually quite handy to have around. Not only did they kill snakes and keep the snail population at bay, “they were good watchdogs,” says Mitchell Hearns Bishop, a curator at the Arboretum. “If someone or something came around, like a bobcat, they would give their alarm call, which is loud and piercing.”
Back then, owning a peacock also was a status symbol. “In the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was quite fashionable with the well-to-do who had land to put various animals on their property that they found colorful, attractive or unique. And a peacock in display is certainly magnificent,” says Francine A. Bradley, a peafowl specialist at UC Davis. “There was a brag factor to it.”