Originally published at: Check out this awesome silhouette of a flying peacock | Boing Boing
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“As god is my witness, I didn’t think peacocks could fly.”
(despite discovering one on the roof of my house once)
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i grew up on a farm in texass and we raised peafowl (among other cool critters).
can confirm 100% peacocks can fly.
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those tail feathers must create a lot of drag - and yet they are more important for breeding than the decrease in flight ability is on survival !
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“Get a haircut you hippy!”
“Oh man, what a drag.”
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Saw one fly when on vacay in Hawaii, a few years back; it wasn’t quite as cool as this footage, though.
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Peafowl are totally the drag queens of the bird world.
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All that shimmying, butt shaking and their own personal feather boa - yeah, totally.
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That’s a legendary pokemon. Articuno maybe?
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We had them, in huge numbers at military school as a deterrent from escaping [or intruding], they screech [horrid] at such volume that you’d never get near the fence without alerting them, and thusly thwarted was your grasp for freedom.
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Add me to the stack of people who thought that peafowl were flightless birds.
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It looked like a dragon!
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I´ve seen videos of them flying before. They look like some kind of mystical creature. Maybe that is where the legend of the Phoenix comes from.
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They have an unpleasant cry too
At my primary school in Durham (UK) there were peafowl who lived on the roof of a nearby factory (I have no idea why, or how they survived).
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There is something very primal about those sounds.
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Definitely not soothing though. 
That was the most incredible thing I’ve seen in a long time. I knew peacocks could fly, but I didn’t realize how magnificent they do it.
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May I posit the pheasant as the second greatest birb drag queen?
Golden Pheasant
Hume’s Pheasant
Everyone who’s seen a ring-necked pheasant up fairly close knows they are also quite a spectacular birb.
One day mom had some expired corn meal and there was also a pheasant in our yard. She went out on the back porch steps, Called The Pheasant! “Chick chick chick!” And fuck if he didn’t come running!
She sprinkled the corn meal out on the sidewalk for him, and she said he was so happy, he just couldn’t help having a scratch! 
There are, or were, before the bird plague, many peafowl at liberty in the Detroit Zoo grounds. Spend enough time there, and you see them fly. It is quite a sight.
One afternoon, my then-BF and I visited the zoo. I brought along a couple whole wheat blueberry bagels, figuring we’d get ahem peckish. Sure enough, just as we felt hungry, a peacock hove into view. We began dropping small pieces of bagel as we went, so he naturally followed. Other visitors LOL’d, and we told them what we were giving him, which they agreed was an eminently suitable peacock treat. A zoo employee saw what was going on, but before he could tell us we were being naughty, I told him what we were feeding him. He cracked up, and gave us a wave which suggested it was okay with him, too. He walked off still chuckling and grinning.
Never seen a white one at the Detroit Zoo!
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It wasn’t Ushaw Moor, was it? Seems to be a bit of a mystery where those ones came from (though a farm in Waterhouses has had peacocks for years and years).
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