The prevailing theory about why peacocks flock to suburban Pinecrest is that, like many a Floridian, they went hunting for better real estate.
Long a mainstay in bohemian Coconut Grove, a Miami neighborhood down the road, the non-native birds have started heading south in recent years, local officials suspect, as the Grove’s old cottages are being renovated. massive modern houses that splashed through the lush tree canopy in the area. In the affluent village of Pinecrest, the peafowl found larger lots with more plants than they wanted.
The birds, however, don’t like their new human neighbors much. Peacocks scratch the roofs of posh homes, chip paint off posh cars and pollute posh driveways. Their piercing squawks — “aa-AAH! aaah!” — often wakes up residents before dawn.
So Pinecrest came up with a novel plan: peacock vasectomies.
Cut down a male peacock, the thinking goes, and it will no longer be able to fertilize the eggs of the female peahens in its harem.
“Peacocks are bona fide polygamists,” said Dr. Don J. Harris, the veterinarian hired by Pinecrest to perform the procedure. “We’ll catch a peacock and probably stop the seven females from breeding. It will have an exponential benefit.”
No one knows if, or how well, Pinecrest’s pilot program will work. But in laid-back South Florida, where people have no choice but to mingle with wildlife both native (alligators, sharks) and invasive (pythons, iguanas), it’s a new way to try to tackle an old problem .
“I certainly don’t want to kill them – God, no,” said Gerald Greenberg, who has about seven peafowl living in an oak tree in front of him. But, he added, “We’ve got to do one thing.”
What makes Florida different, said Ron Magill, the communications director for Zoo Miami, is that in most of the rest of the country, winter will kill most exotic species.
“When those animals come out here in South Florida, they come into Club Med,” he said. “This is paradise.”
Iridescent peacocks have roamed some of Miami’s larger neighborhoods for decades, with little consensus about what to do with them. To their protectors, they are noble and beautiful. To their critics, they are a constant nuisance.
In 2001, when the peafowl population was smaller, Miami-Dade County made it illegal to kill or capture them, except for homeowners to remove the birds from their property without harming them. . Many municipalities, including Miami, are bird sanctuaries.
So over the years, when neighbors grumbled about the peacocks driving them cuckoo, local officials sided with the birds. Miami, after all, is a city where chickens and roosters roam free on some streets and, since the coronavirus pandemic, have proliferated around the federal courthouse and other downtown buildings.
But last year, as more communities complained about the peacocks property destruction, a divided County Commission voted on allow municipal governments to submit “peafowl mitigation plans.” Pinecrest, a village of about 18,000, was the first to do so with it vasectomy planwhich was approved by county commissioners last month.
The office of Raquel A. Regalado, the commissioner who includes the Pinecrest district, agreed to pay about $15,000 for veterinary equipment to perform the vasectomies. Pinecrest budgeted $7,500 per month to implement the plan.
Vasectomies will allow peacocks to continue acting like dominant males, showing off their dazzling plumage and building their harems, although they can no longer fertilize any eggs. But catching peacocks, with their sharp beaks and claws, is not easy. And while endoscopic avian vasectomies (where the vas deferens are cut) are less complicated than full castrations (where the testes are removed), surgery is still surgery.
Dr. remembered Jim Wellehan, a professor of zoological medicine at the University of Florida, performed endoscopic gonadectomies at a zoological institution several years ago to control the mallard duck population. “At first, there were so many challenges, and it was difficult,” he said. “But before long, it was gone.”
“Honestly, the cost that goes into trap-and-release programs is really hard to justify,” he said. But people often don’t want to euthanize animals.
Earlier this year, the euthanizing aggressive Muscovy ducks in Palmetto Bay, south of Pinecrest, has sparked outrage among some residents held a candlelight vigil for the deceased.
No similar friendly displays have occurred for the Pinecrest peacocks, although Shannon del Prado, the councilwoman who proposed the program, said several people have written to say the birds should be left alone.
“‘You’re trying to exterminate the peacock,'” he said someone told him. “It’s not really like that. I have a rescue cat, but he’s been fixed.”
Others reacted like David O. Markus, a 16-year Pinecrest resident who called the peafowl a “plague.” A peacock attacked his Tesla, leaving it scratched. (The boys think they see their reflections in the paint, misidentify them as rivals, and kiss.)
Mr. Greenberg, a lawyer, said that sometimes he’s on a Zoom call and a peacock screams.
“People from other parts of the country would stop and ask me what that noise was,” he said. “I’ll explain that they have pigeons – and we have peacocks.”
