Thread: peacock hunting

Peacocks……..

As you already know I do like hunting a wily old peacock... The ones here are intelligent and very wary birds, extremely cautious and far more inclined to bolt for cover at distant human movement than any of the other bigger birds we have here - turkeys, pheasants, etc. The mob in the valley here is now much diminished due to my efforts, but I do admit to a bit of a sneaky population management in that I am very reluctant to get rid of the whole lot because they do provide exceptional sport in early summer. Trying to get close enough for a rimfire shot is a genuine hunting challenge with these birds.

Last season there was a big cock bird that needed to go whilst he still had his train, after several failed attempts to get him from close up I had to resort to the .223 Rem.

@Bill999 I think the intelligence of a particular flock comes from years of wild experience versus introduced birds that come from domesticated stock. The ones we have here are seriously onto it, cunning as fuck. When we moved here something I was unaware of was how a hen can pass down trade secrets and educate a flock, specifically I’m thinking of how they learn to scratch open haylage bales in search of grubs. This was almost certainly an evolved, learned behaviour from farmers leaving old open bales in the back paddocks and the birds realising that they were a rich source of food; at some point they made the leap between foraging around in open bales, to opening sealed bales. That is not good. So anyway they are public enemy number one here as they have caused quite a lot of damage in the past.