Officials loosen protections for peacocks in Miami
On any given day, Raquel Regalado, a member of the Miami-Dade County Commission, receives scores of emails, all of them with the same subject line: peacocks.
The magnificent jeweled-toned birds, which are not native to Florida, have become an intriguing fixture across Miami’s neighborhoods. But what began as an exotic mystery has quickly turned into a battle pitting neighbors against each other — while some treasure the iridescent birds, others loathe them for their excessive numbers, extensive property damage and ample defecation, Regalado said.
“The peacocks have been totally out of control for over two years!!” a Pinecrest resident wrote to city officials in an email obtained by The Washington Post. “They have inundated my daughter’s neighborhood with their poop all over the place. Their wailing early morning and evening is a constant distraction and annoyance.”
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A 20-year-old Miami-Dade County law protects peacocks from harm and capturing — something Regalado said had enabled the population to mushroom to hundreds. With the bird’s mating season creeping in from February to March, the county’s commission voted Tuesday to allow cities to opt out of protecting peacocks if they are able to present a plan for humanely removing them from properties where they are not welcomed.
“It is one of Miami’s most controversial issues, as nuts as that sounds, because you have folks that absolutely adore them. You have folks that … consider them a nuisance. And then you have other people that really have never interacted with them,” Regalado said.
Native to Asia and Africa, the peacocks’ emergence in South Florida remains a mystery — though a theory posits that they were first bought as pets and escaped. Frolicking in porches and parks has made them part of Miami’s iconography, but their growth in the past years has yielded increasing concerns.
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Their population number is yet to be established — in part because rules bar cities from trapping and tagging them. But researchers from Florida International University estimate between 650 to 1,500 live in Coconut Grove, according to the University of Miami filmmakers of “Peafowl Predicament: Friend or ‘Foul’?”
Unlike pythons and iguanas — other nonnative species that have found a home in the Sunshine State — peafowl are considered a domestic species and are protected under Florida’s anti-cruelty law, said Lisa Thompson, a spokesperson for the state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. Essentially, peacocks receive the same treatment as cattle, pigs, chickens and sheep and fall “under the jurisdiction of local governments,” Thompson said. Miami’s city code declares the city a bird sanctuary and makes it “unlawful for any person to shoot, trap or in any manner kill or destroy birds within the city.”
What this all means is that there’s not much cities can do when neighbors call about the birds’ pesky antics. Regardless of the damages to cars and roofs, piles of poop or aggressive behavior, trappers cannot capture peacocks and release them back into the wild. Their nests and eggs are also protected.
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In previous years, the Miami City Commission voted to relocate the excess peacocks from Coconut Grove — where residents complained of being held “hostage to a group of birds,” the Miami Herald reported. But finding places willing to take them has proven to be a challenge, said Kathy Labrada, assistant director of the Miami-Dade County Animal Services Department.
Share this articleShare“The county has not been able to identify a sanctuary that peacocks can safely be confined in; there’s been no interest,” Labrada told the county’s commissioners on Tuesday. “We searched statewide for a sanctuary or zoo that would be willing to accept them. So the alternative would be humane euthanasia.”
The prospect of the beautiful birds dying quickly divided the officials, with Commissioner Oliver Gilbert asking, “Are we talking about sentencing peacocks to death now?” Others, like Commissioner Danielle Cohen Higgins — whose district includes Palmetto Bay, a designated bird sanctuary — opposed the proposal to rid peacocks of their protection.
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“They almost become a part of the community,” Cohen Higgins said. “I know our residents lose it when anyone harms any of these peacocks.”
That same divide is present across the communities where some residents find parallels of Miami’s melting pot of cultures within the birds that arrived by happenstance.
“The problem is that each female can lay between 15 and 30 eggs each mating season, so the number really begins to add up,” Regalado said. “That’s how you end with multiple packs of dozens of peacocks prowling all over these urban places,” she said.
In Regalado’s district — which includes the peacock-infused communities of Coral Gables, Coconut Grove and South Miami — the mating season comes with fears of overly aggressive birds, some of which bang at doors and windows after confusing their reflection for another male. Some neighbors have racked up $30,000 worth of bills after peacocks pecked at their roofs. One woman was “terrorized by a peacock who wouldn’t let her out of her house,” the commissioner said.
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With the bill, Regalado said cities would now be able to calculate how many birds they are able to sustain and decide on a humane course of action to relocate the excess.
“They’re beautiful, but there’s a difference between five peacocks, and 10 and 100,” Regalado said. “We want to take action before we get to a terrible tipping point and they become an unsustainable nuisance like the pythons.”
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