The Indian peafowl forages on the ground in small groups, known as musters, that usually have a single peacock and three to five peahens. After the breeding season, the flocks tend to be made up only of females and young. It is found in the open early in the mornings and tends to rest under cover during the heat of the day. It is often sighted dust-bathing at dusk. It roosts on tall trees at night, but may sometimes make use of rocks or buildings. Birds usually arrive at their roosting sites during the dusk and call frequently before taking their positions. Despite its size, the Indian peafowl is capable of flight. However, it rarely flies and often escapes by running on foot through the undergrowth when perturbed or disturbed. When it takes off, it uses regular, slower flaps to maintain flight rather than gliding. In the
Gir forest, its diet contains a large proportion of
Zizyphus berries. Its diet in the Anaikatty Hills consists largely of vegetable matter and less than 9% of
ants,
termites,
grasshoppers,
beetles and
earthworms. Two Indian peafowl were observed pecking on and teasing a cobra, but they did not kill it.
Communication The most common calls are a loud
pia-ow or
may-awe with the frequency of calling increasing before the
monsoon season. It raises loud sounds when alarmed or disturbed and are often used to indicate the presence of a
predators such as the
tiger in the forests. It also makes other calls such as a rapid series of
ka-aan..ka-aan or a rapid
kok-kok. It often emits an explosive low-pitched
honk! when agitated.
Breeding The Indian peacock is
polygamous. Several often closely related cocks congregate at a
lek site. They maintain small territories next to each other and allow females to visit them, but make no attempt to guard harems, and females do not favour specific males. The peacock uses its ornate train in a
courtship display, wherein it raises the tail feathers into an arched fan and quivers them. When a peacock is displaying, peahens appear not to show any interest and usually continue foraging. Cocks start shedding their train feathers between end of July in
Bandipur National Park and end of October in eastern Tamil Nadu. The female lays a
clutch of three to eight oval shaped eggs. The eggs measure about in length and in width. They appear polished and have thick shells with pits and pores. The colour varies from pale white to buff or reddish-brown. The males take no part in hatching or rearing the young. The eggs are incubated by the females for about 28 to 30 days. The chicks are
nidifugous and follow the mother around after hatching. Downy young may sometimes climb on their mothers' back and the female may carry them in flight to a safe tree branch.
Sexual selection 's painting (1907) The Indian peacock is known for its brighter and elaborate colours, compared to the much duller peahen, which has been a puzzle to scientists.
Charles Darwin failed to see an adaptive advantage for the extravagant tail which seemed only to be an encumbrance. He wrote to botanist
Asa Gray, "the sight of a feather in a peacock's tail, whenever I gaze at it, makes me sick!". He developed the principle of
sexual selection to explain the problem, however, though not everyone accepted the theory. In 1907, American artist
Abbott Handerson Thayer showed in his painting that the eyespots helped form a
disruptive camouflage. In his 1909 book
Concealing-Coloration in the Animal Kingdom, he denied the possibility of sexual selection and argued that essentially all forms of
animal coloration had evolved as
camouflage. The theory was criticized by
Theodore Roosevelt. In the 1970s,
Amotz Zahavi proposed a possible resolution to the apparent contradiction between natural selection and sexual selection. He argued that the peacock
honestly signalled the
handicap principle of having a large and costly train. However, the mechanism may be less straightforward than it seems and the cost could be that the
hormones that enhance feather development also results in the depression of the
immune system.
Ronald Fisher's
runaway model proposed a positive feedback between female preference for elaborate trains and development of the elaborate train itself. However, this model assumes that the male train is a relatively recent evolutionary adaptation and a molecular phylogeny study shows the opposite that the most recently evolved species is actually the least ornamented one. This finding suggests a chase-away sexual selection in which females evolved resistance to the male ploy of elaborate trains". A study on the feral population of Indian peafowl at
Whipsnade Wildlife Park in southern
England showed that the number of eyespots in the train predicted a male's mating success; further, this success could be manipulated by cutting the eyespots off some of the male's ornate feathers. Furthermore, the study also found that the chicks fathered by more ornamented males weighed more than those fathered by less ornamented males, which indicated an increased survival ability. However, recent studies have failed to find a relation between the number of displayed eyespots and mating success. A seven-year study of free-ranging peafowl came to the conclusion that female peafowl do not select mates solely on the basis of their trains and it is an obsolete signal for which female preference has already been "lost or weakened". It found no evidence that peahens expressed any preference for peacocks with more elaborate trains, trains having more
ocelli, a more symmetrical arrangement, or greater length. It determined that the peacock's train was not the universal target of female
mate choice, and do not correlate to male physical conditions. It argued that the removal of eyespots substantially changed the appearance of male peafowls, and it was likely that the females mistook these males for sub-adults, or perceived that the males were physically damaged. Moreover, in a feral peafowl population, there is little variation in the number of eyespots in adult males as it is rare for adult males to lose a significant number of eyespots and hence, it might not form the basis for sexual selection. The British research team argued that alternative explanations for these results had been overlooked, and concluded that female choice might indeed vary in different ecological conditions. While train length seems to correlate positively with
major histocompatibility complex diversity in males, females do not appear to use train length to choose males. Another study in France brought up two possible explanations with the first explanation stating that there might be a genetic variation of the trait of interest under different geographical areas due to a
founder effect and/or a
genetic drift. The second explanation suggested that "the cost of trait expression may vary with environmental conditions," so that a trait that is indicative of a particular quality may not work in another environment.
Lifespan and mortality The Indian peafowl is known to live for up to 23 years in captivity. However, it is estimated to live for only about 15 years in the wild. Adult Indian peafowls are difficult to capture since they can usually escape
predators by flying into trees;
tiger,
leopard,
hyena,
dhole and
golden jackal ambush adult individuals. Smaller peafowl are sometimes hunted by large birds of prey such as
changeable hawk-eagle and
rock eagle-owl. Chicks are more prone to predation than adult birds. Adults living near human habitations might sometimes be hunted by domestic
dogs or by humans. == Threats and conservation ==