The first sound on the farm most mornings isn't a rooster. It's Carlos, somewhere up on the barn roof, yelling at the sunrise like he has a grievance with it. If you have never heard a peacock call before, imagine a car alarm that learned a vowel. Now imagine it from forty feet up, in iridescent blue, with three henchmen waiting in the rafters.
That is how we know The Cartel is awake.
The Cartel is what we call our four peacocks: Carlos, Raul, Jorge, and Guillermo. The naming started as a family joke and stuck the way the best jokes do — quietly, and forever. Carlos is the unmistakable boss. Raul is the one who wanders off and reappears two pastures away looking mildly insulted that no one came looking. Jorge and Guillermo are the muscle, though calling anything that pretty "muscle" feels generous. Together they patrol the property like they own the deed, and at this point we are not entirely sure they don't.
How four peacocks ended up running a Michigan farm
We brought them in as young birds about two years ago and started them in a coop, the way you are supposed to. The coop lasted exactly as long as it took them to figure out the door. Now they are fully free-range across our thirty acres in Ithaca, Michigan, which is a polite way of saying they go wherever they want and we narrate it.
They roost in the rafters of the big barn. They walk the roof of the house like they are inspecting shingles. They cut across the pasture in single file, tails dragging in the frost, and the Highland cows lift their heads, decide this is not their problem, and go back to eating. If you have ever wondered what peacocks eat on a farm, the answer is: yes. Kibble, scratch grains, weeds, beetles, whatever the chickens drop, whatever the goats don't finish, and — to the eternal grief of the raised beds — anything green and tender that dares to sprout. The gardens lost that war in the first season. We have made peace with it.
People ask if peacocks are friendly. The honest answer is that peacocks are not friendly the way a dog is friendly. They are friendly the way a celebrity is friendly. They will pass near you. They will allow you to admire them. They will accept a handful of grain as tribute. Carlos in particular has a way of arriving when something interesting is happening and standing just close enough to be in the photo. He knows.
The day the wolves gave up
Our two huskies — Chase and Everest, the "Wolf" in Wolf & Steer — were not initially fans. A peacock, to a husky-mix sibling pair raised in Texas and relocated north, is an unacceptable shape. It is bird, but too much bird. They barked. They postured. They did the full raptor routine through the fence.
The peacocks did not care.
That is the thing nobody tells you about peacocks. They do not negotiate. They do not retreat. They simply continue to exist, loudly and beautifully, in whatever spot they have chosen, until the world adjusts around them. After a few weeks of this, the dogs sat down. A few weeks after that, the dogs stopped looking up when Carlos walked across the yard. The standoff was over. The Cartel had won by sheer refusal to leave.
The goats, on the other hand, never bothered with conflict. The Glam Squad — Birky, Chanel, Gucci, Louie, and Prada — went straight to theft. If a peacock sets down a snack and turns its head, a goat will take it. Barry, our scheming solo goat, watches all of this from a distance with the energy of a man taking notes for later. We assume he and Carlos have an arrangement. We have not asked.
What it's like to share a farm with peacocks
The thing we did not expect, when we took on four peacocks, was how much they would change the texture of a day. A Michigan farm in November is mostly browns and grays and the hard blue of a cold sky. And then a tail fans open near the woodpile, and suddenly there is a color in the yard that doesn't exist anywhere else on the property. It feels unreasonable. It feels like the farm is showing off.
They are part of the cast now, the same way the Highland cows are, the same way Q-tip's jet-black nose against his white face is. If you like the rest of our weird, gentle, slightly absurd roster, you can wander the Meet the Animals collection and see the cows and the goat-on-a-cow situation we have going on with Barry and Belle. The peacocks are not on a mug yet. We are working on getting Carlos to hold still for a portrait. He has notes.
If you ever drive through mid-Michigan in the early morning and hear something that sounds like a car alarm with feelings, that is probably him. Tell him we said hello. He won't acknowledge you, but he'll know.