#but that's the only other book I'd currently consider writing wrt peafowl

[kedreeva]

I've been told multiple times by multiple people that I should write books about peafowl, but unfortunately my experience with peafowl is limited to my own animals, what I can observe in videos others have taken of wild and captive birds, and anecdotes. If I were going to write a book on peafowl, particularly on behavior, I would want to have observed them in the wild over the span of a year or more, with full documentation of everything I observed, including any videos I could take and any journaling I could do. And I just don't see that happening any time soon, all things considered.

I AM documenting my knowledge of peafowl genetics to my website now, which is considerably better organized than the spreadsheet is, and I will likely consider offering a hard copy of that info once I've finished the transfer, mostly because I'll have all the photos I would need to do that. It would be.... an extremely niche group of people to have such a book, but I would like to be able to say I wrote The Book on peafowl genetics. Which I've already done, technically, I just don't have it in book form yet :)

So. I showed you Bug's begging dance yesterday, but I feel you should get to see the death drill as well. When she actually gets a mouse, she performs the death drill- a rapid back and forth shake of her head with her beak almost against the ground, that would extremely efficiently kill any small animal she got her beak on in the wild.

Thankfully she is not in the wild and the mouse is already dead, but she doesn't know that.

Also it's just impressive how the mouse disappears. Schlorp. No horking necessary.

Anyway, I think about the death drill a lot. I wonder if velociraptors did this to small prey items. If archeopteryx did. If compsognathus did. They had hands, or at least front claws, but I wonder if they did this still. How many ghosts of dinosaurs past echo in her behaviors?