Guess who’s home after a wild adventure? A Quebec man’s wayward peacock is finally back in the coop 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 fairly rare all-white male peacock is no longer on the lam.
“It was never far,” he said in an interview Friday. “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 other one decided to fly the coop, as they say,” Batty explained, “into the neighbour’s yard. It has been about 10 days that it took us to catch it.”
The snow-coloured peacock evaded capture morning and night and quickly became the talk of the town as he flew hither and thither – residents repeatedly encountered the newfound celebrity in all his escapee glory.
Batty, in the meantime, was playing long YouTube clips of peacock calls to try and coax his missing friend back home. The other half of the pair appreciated the videos too, excited by the digital squawks and joining in.
While he knew his feathered friend wasn’t strutting his stuff too far away, the animal enthusiast was relieved when his neighbour called him Thursday night to say the bird was in his yard. The runaway peacock was perched on a shed and Batty saw his chance.
“I was able to lure it down onto the ground and then into the corner, where there was a chain-link fence,” he said. “And it wanted to go left and right.”
“I just kept cornering it and finally caught it with my bare hands.”
The peacock’s adventure was finally over. He’s now back home with his fellow peacock and other 40 animals on the hobby farm.
Batty says he plans to modify the latch in the barn stall where his much-loved birds are kept to make sure the mischievous peacock never gets loose again.
“I’m just grateful to have it back and that nothing happened to it,” he said.
— with files from Global News’ Felicia Parrillo and David Sedell