Show Off

Color. PLEASE. I need some COLOR…some sense of warmth and LIFE! It’s rain­ing here AGaiN!!!!! And it’s COLD. And why I went for 2 days with­OUT Inter­net and now that it IS rain­ing, I actu­ally HAVE it is as baf­fling as are the qual­i­fi­ca­tions for being employed by Char­ter Com­mu­ni­ca­tions as a tech­ni­cian. But I digress…as usual.

An adult male pea­cock has about 200 tail feath­ers that are shed and re-grown annu­ally. About 170 of these tail feath­ers are ‘eye’ feath­ers and about 30 are ‘T’ feath­ers. The struc­ture of these feath­ers, their place­ment and the bird’s abil­ity to ‘deploy’ them in stun­ning dis­plays of color is a nat­ural won­der of intri­cate and crit­i­cal design. The mech­a­nisms respon­si­ble for pro­duc­ing these beau­ti­ful fea­tures of the male’s dis­play feath­ers are very sophisticated.

If you’re painfully GEEKY like Shel­don from The Big Bang The­ory, you might be inter­ested in read­ing more about pea­cocks and their flashy feath­ers in this arti­cle: (click here). It goes into absurd detail, com­plete with sci­en­tific math­e­mat­i­cal equations–GEEZ!), and the appear­ance of the word ‘geni­sis’ in the address, along with a light skim over the page’s text seems to indi­cate there is some­thing in here some­where about the argu­ment between cre­ation­ism and evo­lu­tion. I don’t par­tic­u­larly CARE about such detail, nor does the com­mon pea­HEN. The impor­tant issue is that to be in the pres­ence of a show-off male pea­cock is exhil­a­rat­ing and a won­der to behold. For­tu­nately for the pea­cock, pea­hens feel the same way.

You can meet this hand­some spec­i­men at Hol­ly­wild Ani­mal Park in Inman, SC.

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