If you’ve ever wanted to know why peacocks have such amazing feathers, why they’re not all called peacocks, and plenty of other neat stuff about peacocks, then perhaps this episode on peacocks is for you. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck. Jerry's here, too. And I can't think of anything hilarious to say, so I'm just going to say this is Stuff You Should Know.
That's right. Live show listener request edition because Peacocks came to us. Did you get her name? Or can we just say the wonderful young girl at our Atlanta live show?
I really want to say Sarah. But I'm not sure. So whoever you are, a young girl who suggested peacocks at the Atlanta show, write in to tell us your name so we can tell everybody.
Yeah. So this is a great idea. We're talking about peacocks, which is, if you want to look at the word itself, it's English. And it is derived from the Latin word pavo. And in Old English, that was pronounced pawa, P-A-W-A. And that was shortened over the years to po, eventually peacock. Pocock, then Powcock, and I guess peacock.
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Chapter 2: What is the origin of the word 'peacock'?
And it's linked a little bit to this old expression, proud as a poe, which is, you know, how a peacock kind of struts around all prideful. And then eventually it became peacock.
Yeah. And you would think it would have become peacock like in the 1950s or 60s. But no, it became peacock as far back as the 1300s. Yeah. So that's it for etymology of peacock, but there's a little more about the word peacock because a lot of you are getting things wrong and you need to be corrected harshly sometimes. A peacock is specifically the male of the species. Obviously.
The peahen is the female. So if you see a brown kind of drab looking peacock and you say, look at that brown peacock. Well, you just sound like a hayseed. It's a peahen and she's not drab. She's camouflaged.
That's right. They're little babies called pea chicks. And if you want to talk, as we're going to, about the species as a whole, we're going to be saying pea fowl. And then we will, you know, when we say cock, we're going to mean male. When we say hen, we're going to mean lady. And when we say chick, we're going to mean beebee.
Okay. I think we've really laid it out.
There are three main species, speaking of laying this out, of the peafowl. And you have the most common, if you live in the United States and you've seen one, maybe in a zoo, maybe in a park, or maybe just strutting around your neighborhood.
Yeah, we have some walking around our area, too.
Oh, yeah. Is it, I mean, the same ones from many years ago? Because you told the story years ago about the sound of the peacock.
Sorry, no. Those were Yumi's grandma's peacock, neighborhood peacocks. And for some reason, the ones that live around me are not a disturbance at all. I mean, they make their sounds, but it's few and far between. It's not annoying at all. It's kind of cute. And it's just a different experience than it was around Yumi's grandma's house.
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Chapter 3: What are the different species of peafowl?
You know what I'm saying? Yeah, I know what you're saying.
Or if they just had little pea strokes and died.
They were elf-struck. So they also, they honk, too. Like, I can't even do the honk. Like a goose? That's that hoot dash thing sounds kind of like a honk.
Oh, yeah, it does sound a little honkish.
Yeah, so they can do that a lot, too. And if you put it all together, yeah, it can be very annoying. But, Chuck, I cannot figure out what the difference is between Yumi's grandma's neighborhood and my neighborhood because I have a completely different opinion of the annoyance level of peacocks now. I don't understand why, but there's the facts.
Well, maybe you aged into it.
I guess so. I'm older, wiser, gentler. Yeah. More peacock loving. Sure. I think we all get that way. Sure.
All right. So let's talk about the history of these things. Jumping back a little bit. A few thousand years ago, the ancient Phoenicians... were the first folks to say, hey, these things are great. Let's move them around to different places because these things strutting around a palace is really something to see. So they brought them from India to Syria.
They were traded around the Mediterranean at that point. And they did become like a status symbol. If you were nobility or royalty or had a lot of money or lived in a palace, then you probably wanted some peacocks strolling around your property.
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Chapter 7: What is the difference between peacocks and peahens?
That's right. And that choosing is based on that flashy display that we're going to talk a little bit more about as far as the colors and stuff go and that vibration. But if there's science behind that or is there science behind that? Yes.
In 1994, it seems like it at least, there were some researchers in Britain that found that the bigger peacocks that had more eye spots, you know, they look like eyes. What are they called? Ocelli? Ocelli?
Okay.
But the more of those they have and the larger that they are and the more just big and beautiful they are, it looks like the larger offspring they're going to have, they're going to be more likely to survive. So it seems like they are more genetically fit.
Yeah, and those eye spots play a real starring role in this whole sexual selection mating process, right?
So the feathers in and of themselves are pretty amazing, but the eye spots, these little dots with different colors on them that are scattered all across the train feathers, the fan, they are of a slightly different structure, slightly different density than the rest of the feathers surrounding them. So when that train resonates at 25.6 hertz,
They appear to stand still and float against the background of the other feathers that are vibrating at the same frequency, but are just of a slightly different density. And this is so important. These ocelli, the eye spots, are so important that scientists have figured out that other species that also have eye spots... They don't share a common ancestor with peacocks that had eye spots, Chuck.
Eye spots evolved separately over different times among different species. They're that important for mating.
That's right. And thanks to our listener mail in the Ruby Ridge episode, it's called Convergent Evolution and Not Co-Evolution.
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