Pretty Boy Showing Off

I'm a bit late, but it is time for another "Tuesday’s Show & Tail." This meme is hosted every week by Angela over at West Virginia Treasures, and it is always a lot of fun to see all the interesting posts of the people who join in! It is a meme to share about past or present pets or furry friends we’ve known. If you’d like to join, here is the link to the Guidelines.


Last week several people were showing and talking about Peacocks, and so I looked through several of our old films and found this short video of our Peacock, Pretty Boy. When my Dad would say, “Pretty Boy, show us your tail…” this peacock would fan out his tail for everyone to see how beautiful he was.


I’m so sorry that these films are in such bad shape. They are around 50 years old (give or take 3 years) because I was still living in Frazier Park and we moved to Taft in 1959. I mentioned in my last Show & Tail, that we gave him, along with our other peacocks and peahens to Fess Reynolds when we moved. He was shot by a hunter several years later.

He was a beautiful bird! One thing happened though, during the time we had him and the others, which made me believe that my Dad was a “Superman Mind Reader!” I had locked the peacocks up in the chicken coop one day while my sister and I played out in the big fenced lot at the back of our property, and forgot to let them out. They weren’t supposed to be locked up.


When my Daddy got home from work and found them, he took me out to that yard and asked me how they had gotten locked up, and I told him that my sister had done it. He got really ticked and I got a “lickin!” I KNEW that he hadn’t been home and was convinced from that time on that he would ALWAYS know if I did something bad, so I’d better not EVER lie to him again! Many years later, I asked him how he had known that it was me. He didn’t even remember the incident, but said that it was probably because my sister was only 3 years old, while I was 5 and the door to the chicken coop was to hard for her to have closed!