Loose Cocks, News Gawks
On slow journalism days, thank goodness for fugitive peafowls
I was actually really surprised that the peacock escaping from the (overrated) Bronx zoo story this week was even news at all — to the extent of getting a few paragraphs in the Times no less: “The bird, nicknamed Raul by its neighbors, spent most of Wednesday night and Thursday morning perched high up in a cottonwood tree in Vidalia Park near East 180th Street and Vyse Avenue, about two blocks from the zoo.”
I would think that birds escape from zoos all the time — at least species that always roam around the zoo free and uncaged. I mean, they have wings, right? And zoos don’t have roofs! (If it was an escaped anteater, say, I could definitely see that being a proper news story.) Turns out this journalistic boondoggle has been going on since at least 1935. What am I missing here? But sure enough, when I googled the story, a few very similar Times reports from the past dozen years immediately showed up:
May 11, 2020: “The peacock, named Snowbank, had escaped from the Franklin Park Zoo, which is part of Zoo New England and has been closed to the public during the coronavirus pandemic. Zoo officials said later on Monday that he was back home and doing well.”
August 21, 2012: “Consider the peacock that has taken up residence in Kew Gardens Hills, Queens. By some accounts, it has been wandering the streets for at least a week. Sightings have been plentiful. Calls to 911 and 311 have been made. And still, the peacock persists, largely free of prying cameras and fawning attention.”
August 2, 2011: “Only weeks after a peahen bolted from the Bronx Zoo and before the world had a chance to forget about the zoo’s missing cobra, a peacock left the Central Park Zoo on Tuesday to perch across the street on a window ledge on Fifth Avenue.”
May 10, 2011: “This time, the escapee was a wily brown and green peahen, which was spotted roaming the streets — and dodging zoo workers — at least twice on Tuesday..”
Searching older Times archives turns up a couple more still:
May 8, 2007: “Early yesterday afternoon, a peahen — a female peacock — escaped from a 20-foot-high gilded bird cage that had been constructed inside the main entrance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, causing a brief stir as organizers of the annual Costume Institute gala clumsily chased her about the Great Hall. The bird, an indentured guest with pristine white feathers, seemed to be setting a tone for the untamed evening that was to come.”
December 31, 1935: “The azure wings of Osbert, Central Park’s foundling peacock, will be clipped soon in an effort to counteract the wanderlust which periodically takes him on a sight-seeing tour over the rooftops of Central Park South.”
And obviously, the NYTimes is just one newspaper out of thousands. In 2018, four peacocks went on the lam from the Philadelphia zoo and hiked down I-76. In 2014, a peacock ran away from a zoo in suburban Chicago in the middle of winter and, unsurprisingly, froze to death. So okay, maybe more man biting dog than dog biting man. But just barely.
Eliminated for Reasons of Space, 30 April 2023