The peacocks that divided a B.C. town

In today’s Big Story podcast, if you’ve heard a peacock call, you’d know they don’t sound half as good as they look. This unique breed of bird is special, and not native to Canada. So, when a peahen named Pearl showed up in a quaint town out of B.C. called Naramata, nobody knew how she got there.

And after the awe of her emergence faded, and her flock grew and grew, the nuisance of the birds became harder to ignore and the town became divided.

Some loved Pearl as if she and hers were family. Others found the birds’ antics of screaming, destroying cars and ruining gardens intolerable.

Lyndsie Bourgon is a National Geographic explorer, an oral historian, and a writer. She’s documented how Pearl and her family became a town counsel topic for years in Naramata, for The Walrus.

“The peacocks ended up making a sort of nomadic regular round of where they would go from one house to another. They knew the houses that fed them, and they knew the houses that had sheltered places to sleep,” said Bourgon.

This is the story of Pearl and her peacocks.

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