A fairly rare all-white male peacock who flew the cop from a suburban Montreal hobby farm has returned after being missing for 10 days.
Graham Batty, who has a hobby farm in Saint-Lazare, Que., a suburb west of Montreal, is relieved that his peacock is no longer on the lam.
“It was never far,” he said in an interview Friday with Global News. “We could hear it every day making its calls. But to try and catch a bird is next to impossible.”
The free-spirited fugitive first went missing last week after one of Batty’s animals got up to no good in the middle of the night. Sparkles the pony managed to use her nose to unlock the door to a stall filled with birds, letting the pair of white peacocks out.
Batty said his beloved birds’ distinct call woke him up at 5 a.m. and he ran outside with his son to catch them. They were able to corral one of them within a few minutes, but the other one took off.
The peacock was released from its barn by a curious pony.
Batty said he determined his pony, Sparkles, had let the peacocks out of the barn by unlocking the stall door with her nose.
The farm owner said he was able to quickly capture one of the peacocks, but the other flew the coop.
“The bird was at my neighbor’s house for about three or four days,” he told Global News. “I tried on a number of occasions to catch it. I broke one of those long pool scoop things trying to corral it. I haven’t seen it for about two days but I’m still optimistic.”
Residents have been reporting sightings on social media.
“My husband was going, ‘Oh my god, I’ve never seen one like this and I said I think it’s a peacock,'” resident Nadia Forcade said. “I looked it up and I said, ‘Oh, it’s Graham’s.'”
