Geoff and Delwyn Ballantyne only stepped out for an evening coffee. When they returned to their home in Alexandra Hills, a suburb of Brisbane, Australia, a male peacock was in their bathroom, gazing at himself in the vanity mirror.
“There was a lot of screaming from my wife,” Geoff told The Guardian. “She thought there must have been an intruder, but then she says it’s a peacock. I did believe her, but I tried not to, because it wasn’t very believable.”
They tried to tempt him away with water and crackers, but he wouldn’t leave the mirror. Wildlife rescuers eventually wrapped him in a towel and released him into nearby bushland.
But he didn’t stay there. The peacock started showing up every afternoon at the acreage property of another Alexandra Hills resident, Suzie Tafolo, who suspected he belonged to a local tattoo artist, Elliot Ross. Ross had been searching for his missing peacock, Hex, and confirmed from photos that the bathroom intruder was him.
Then Tafolo did some research. “I’ve Googled how to catch a peacock, which is something I never thought I’d have to do,” she said. “One of the things it says is that they love mirrors, which makes sense in terms of how he ended up in the bathroom.”
So she hauled a full-length mirror out to the shed where Hex kept turning up.
The mirror probably wasn’t about vanity. Urban ecologist Darryl Jones told The Guardian that most birds read their reflection as another bird, and Hex may simply have been drawn to what looked like company. Ross had his own theory. “We’ve got a female here as well, and she’s stayed,” he said. “I’m guessing he’s gone walkabout trying to find another female.”
There are also a bunch of videos online showing confused peacocks attacking themselves in the mirror.
Meanwhile, Hex became a neighborhood project, with hundreds of locals tracking his sightings on social media. A week after the bathroom incident, they cornered him in a backyard and used blankets to block his escape. Then, family friend Jordy Barker “just dived in and grabbed him by his legs. He was going ballistic, but she held on,” Ross said.
“I haven’t caught a peacock before, but I used to live on a farm and had to catch turkeys and chickens all the time,” Barker said. “It was just like catching a turkey.”
Hex’s return home came with a scare. He had picked up about half a dozen ticks on the run, and his owners rushed him to a 24-hour vet, where he was treated with an antiserum normally used for dogs. He responded well and is now back home with the family’s peahen, Nyx.
Ross had actually been planning to bring home another female that weekend. “I guess we were too late,” he said.
