A great write-up about our peacock by Jill Kimball.
For more than two months now, Seattle residents Robert and Sasha Stabbert have listened to the intermittent screeches of a peacock.
“It sounds kind of like a child or a woman screaming at the top of her lungs,” Robert Stabbert said. “I’ll be on the telephone 100 feet away from it, and people tell me they can’t hear me.”
The Stabbert family has for the most part enjoyed the presence of the roaming peacock, which has spent its evenings wandering through their alley and backyard. Two-year-old Linnea Stabbert loves its feathers and can imitate the creature’s squawk flawlessly.
But Thursday, after too many nights of loud bird calls, neighbors in the Brighton neighborhood were fed up with the noise and enlisted Stabbert to corral it.
Stabbert was lucky enough to spot the colorful creature on a fence Thursday morning, and he quickly grabbed it by the tail feathers and put it in the garage.
“It was a more humane method of getting rid of it than what some of the neighbors had planned,” Robert Stabbert said. “They said they were going to barbecue it.”
But they were only joking, and, Stabbert said, the neighbors told him they were relieved to find out that King County Regional Animal Services promised to pick up the bird later on Thursday.
Sgt. Brenda Dyrdahl at Animal Services said that when someone calls in with a found pet, they’ll come to collect it and wait three business days for an owner to retrieve it.
But in Dyrdahl’s five years at animal services, she’s never seen someone collect a peacock. “We rescue it to a farm or somebody who wants to take care of it,” she said.
Joey Strom, owner of the Outback Kangaroo Farm in Arlington, said she has rescued about 16 peafowl from individuals who found them in their backyards.
“Unless they’re raised from a chick by the same person, they’ll wander,” Strom said, “so some people will find one in their backyard and not know what to do with it.”
In February, the city of Sultan called Animal Services to help in the capture of nine peafowl that were on the loose all over town. Eight were captured; one male is “still roaming at large.”
Like Sultan, Brighton’s peacock situation hasn’t completely been solved yet. As the peacock was safely contained in the Stabberts’ garage, a peahen was perched on an Aerostar Sport van a block and a half away, yet to be captured.
“If that girl doesn’t leave, we’ll probably have a whole bunch more soon,” Sasha Stabbert said.
But she’d be OK with that. She admitted: “I’m kind of sad one of them is leaving.”
