#i've wanted one for ages but they're usually $100-$200 on the low end and this one is the coolest one i've EVER seen

[sadlittlestray]

how did i not know how easy it is to rewire a lamp this is so fun

[kedreeva]

To add to this from the notes:

Yes, every year, and they look ridiculous

It takes them 3 year to hit maturity and grow their first train with eye feathers- the other two years they have a very silly looking brown baby train with no eyes. Even at three, their train is usually shorter and smaller; it sheds and regrows the following year fuller and longer, until they're about 6. No one is keeping these fragile ass birds alive for 3 years just to kill them, and certainly not until they're 6. Here's what the yearlings look like:

Not impressive, no matter what he tells you

20 is the low end of their lifespan. There are plenty of peafowl that live into their 30's and I've even heard of a few living into their 40s.

"It should be a boy because-" actually it doesn't matter. Hens sometimes feather in like boys when their ovary stops working through malfunction or age or not developing. Like this:

I am tipping my hat to the tags that suggested we could have a world full of cruelty free peacock feathers... we do. but also they drop this entire train in about a week's time in the fall. For people with 1 bird or just a couple, that's a hundred to a few hundred feathers to collect in a week. It gets old. You stop caring about picking them up after the first hundred or so.

BIG breeders (like, 30-100+ breeding birds) sometimes just. burn them. Because they have not enough people to give them to. They clean the pens by relocating the birds, and using a portable little flamethrower thing to torch all the collected feathers. Because it's *so fucking many.* If you want to collect feathers, find a breeder by July, and ask if they'll let you collect feathers when they start dropping.

They do not require "the strength of a grown man" to pluck from dead birds, even at the height of breeding season. Source: I just preserved one of my male's train after he passed away from genetic health complications, and have done so with the first male I ever owned when he passed. You sit down, you pinch at the base of the feather where it hits the skin and rotate to loosen the skin's hold, and while holding there, you pull near the base with your other hand. Should slide out. I hope none of you ever need this knowledge, but I'd rather you treat the dead with some dignity than not say it.

If you ever see something (crafts, jewelry, clothing, art, whatever) with peafowl feathers in it, they are probably not fake. There are a lot of feathers that can be made out of plastic or whatever and still look kinda like real feathers... peafowl feathers are among the most difficult to replicate and also there's no real reason to.

peafowl do NOT fall under the MBTA. It is a USA-only act and peafowl are not native to the US. It is illegal to hunt or kill Indian peafowl in India, though I BELIEVE it is legal still to own naturally-shed feathers.

re: the above, there ARE poachers of wild peafowl in India, who kill native birds for their feathers. Chances are STILL better that the feathers you see for sale have been naturally shed.

Yes you can eat peafowl if you wanted to. I'm told by friends that have tried them that they taste almost exactly like chicken, though that may be because they were farm raised like chickens, instead of wild caught. That said, my understanding is that the birds are best harvested as yearlings, before the meat gets gamey, and at which point (as explained above), they do not yet have the train full of eye feathers.

The entire train (frame feathers and sword feathers included) is around 200 feathers, but large eye feathers only account for around 100 or so of those. This dress apparently has 2009 eye feathers in it; more than I would have guessed, but not a surprising amount either. I'm guessing towards the body of the dress, smaller eye feathers were used, so (accounting for damaged or otherwise unsuitable feathers being discarded) my guess would be it contains around 15-20 trains worth of feathers. It also, iirc, took eight people 40 days to craft.

It's a wedding dress, in case you were wondering.

By me, a peacocks full train collected by some random farmer (and probably not containing all the feathers) costs between $30 and $75. So, even though the feathers are naturally shed, the raw material feathers would have been quite expensive.

Hell of a piece of fashion.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk