Peacock

If you're a Peacock

You arrive, and the room adjusts. A peacock's train is a meter and a half of feathers with up to two hundred eyespots, shaken at the audience with an audible rattle; you dress for the same effect and you have never once been under-dressed. You are bold and social in bursts, and content to stay exactly where you are admired.

The famous tail is not the tail; it is a set of overgrown back feathers, and the color in them is not pigment but microscopic structures that bend light.

The Peacock as a spirit animal

Matching a Peacock says you know what you look like and you have decided it is an asset. You are confident, sociable when there is an audience and loyal to your own ground. The flaw is upkeep: the display costs more than it looks and gets you noticed by things you did not want noticing you. Peacocks also scream like someone being murdered in the garden. Consider that a note on volume.

Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.

How to get along with a Peacock

When it goes wrong: A Peacock under pressure fans out, gets loud and makes it everyone's problem; take them aside, out of the audience's view, and the volume drops within minutes.

The Peacock in a relationship

You court spectacularly and commit cautiously. A peacock displays to several females a season and leaves the nesting to them, so you understand that attention and devotion are not the same thing. When you do settle, you want to be admired at home as much as out. Mirrors help.

Best matchLionBoth carry a heavy ornament that exists to be looked at, and both let someone else do the hard work.

Handle with careHedgehogA hedgehog survives by being overlooked; a peacock could not manage that for one minute.

Field notes

Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works

Sociability

6

Boldness

8

Energy

3

Curiosity

2

Devotion

2

Roaming

1

• A peacock sheds its entire train after the breeding season and grows a new one for the next.
• Despite the train, peafowl fly perfectly well and spend the night roosting high in trees.
• The peahen does all the parenting: she nests on the ground, incubates alone and raises the chicks without the male.

Peacocks in literature

• The Peacock — Aesop's Fables (The Peacock and the Crane), Aesop (550 BCE)
• The Peacock — Fables (The Peacock Complaining to Juno), Jean de La Fontaine (1668)
• The Peacock — The Parliament of Fowls, Geoffrey Chaucer (1382)

Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.

Closest personalities

The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Peacock's. If you got Peacock, one of these was probably your runner-up.

• 

  Hippopotamus93% alike

• 

  Crocodile88% alike

• 

  Lion85% alike

Other birds

EagleOwlRavenHummingbirdPenguinFlamingoAlbatrossParrotSwanWoodpeckerFalconOstrichPigeon

Among the 60

Gustav Mützel (1839–1893), Brehms Tierleben, Alfred Brehm (1891). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits