A pride of feral peacocks is causing havoc by attacking their own reflections in the bodywork of cars parked too close to their territory around a West Country estate.
Apparently mistaking their own images for encroaching love rivals, the birds of Clyst St Mary, Devon, are causing thousands of pounds of damage by clawing away at vehicles.
The birds are believed to have roamed wild around the Bishops Court estate in Devon for years, but people who live and work nearby say they have become bolder and more aggressive.
Drivers say their vehicles have been left covered in scratches almost every day since spring began and the birds became agitated and frisky.
REPEATED ATTACKS
Penny Hill, a manager based on a business estate close to Bishops Court, said her car had been repeatedly attacked.
“The peacocks, although beautiful to look at, are becoming an incredible nuisance, particularly around this time every year, as they are attacking and damaging vehicles. They are aggressive, territorial and intimidating,” Hill said. “My nice clean car sat in the car park and a peacock spent all day attacking its reflection, thinking it was another bird and becoming territorial as it’s mating season.”
“The result was a bloody and scratched mess where the pecking has completely ruined the back of my car, which I take great pride and care with,” she said. “I am not the first person working on the estate that this has happened to.”
Hill said complaints had been made to the estate, which is used as a venue for wedding ceremonies, but Bishops Court insisted the peafowl were wild and had nothing to do with the house.
WILD BIRDS
A spokeswoman for Bishops Court said the birds did not belong to the estate.
“They absolutely do not originate with us. They are just wild. I don’t know where they come from. It is like asking where the robins or the foxes come from,” she said.
Earlier this month, a swan hit the headlines for terrorizing visitors on the River Cam in Cambridge.
The bird was nicknamed “ASbaby” because he is apparently the descendant of an infamous swan dubbed Mr ASBO (Antisocial Behavior Order) who caused chaos on the same stretch of river before being rehomed.
‘GROSS NEGLIGENCE?’ Despite a spleen typically being significantly smaller than a liver, the surgeon said he believed Bryan’s spleen was ‘double the size of what is normal’ A Florida surgeon who is facing criminal charges after allegedly removing a patient’s liver instead of his spleen has said he is “forever traumatized” by that person’s death. In a deposition from November last year that was recently obtained by NBC, 44-year-old Thomas Shaknovsky described the death of 70-year-old William Bryan as an “incredibly unfortunate event that I regret deeply.” Bryan died after the botched surgery; and last month, a grand jury in Tallahassee indicted Shaknovsky on a charge of manslaughter. “I’m forever traumatized by it and hurt by it,” Shaknovsky added, also saying that wrong-site surgeries can happen “during
Kouri Richins, a Utah mother who published a children’s book about grief after the death of her husband is to serve a life sentence for his murder without the possibility of parole, a judge ruled on Wednesday. Richins was convicted in March of aggravated murder for lacing a cocktail given to her husband, Eric Richins, with five times the lethal dose of fentanyl at their home near Park City in 2022. A jury also found her guilty of four other felonies, including insurance fraud, forgery and attempted murder for trying to poison her husband weeks earlier on Feb. 14, 2022, with a
Former Chinese ministers of national defense Wei Fenghe(魏鳳和) and Li Shangfu (李尚福) were both sentenced to death with a two-year reprieve over graft charges, state news agency Xinhua reported on Thursday, underscoring the severity of the purge in the military. The armed forces have been one of the main targets of a broad corruption crackdown ordered by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) after coming to power in 2012. The purges reached the elite Rocket Force, which oversees nuclear weapons as well as conventional missiles, in 2023. Earlier this year they escalated further, resulting in the removal of the top general in
‘PERSONAL MISTAKES’: Eileen Wang has agreed to plead guilty to the felony, which comes with a maximum sentence of 10 years in federal prison A southern California mayor has agreed to plead guilty to acting as an illegal agent for the Chinese government and has resigned from her city position, officials said on Monday. Eileen Wang (王愛琳), mayor of Arcadia, was charged last month with one count of acting in the US as an illegal agent of a foreign government. She was accused of doing the bidding of Chinese officials, such as sharing articles favorable to Beijing, without prior notification to the US government as required by law. The 58-year-old was elected in November 2022 to a five-person city council, from which the mayor is selected
RSS