A chick walks alongside a peahen at Floyd Lamb Park at Tule Springs Wednesday, July 24, 2024.
Sunday, July 28, 2024 | 2 a.m.
The future is now for the peafowl of Floyd Lamb Park at Tule Springs with the birth of a chick for the first time in at least two years.
The locally famous flock of showy birds, generations of which have inhabited the sprawling Las Vegas city park since it was a privately owned ranch in the 1940s, was approaching the end of the genetic road when its females died in 2022.
Word didn’t spread widely until earlier this year, but people responded strongly when it did, and the Peafowl Preservation Program came to be. Valley residents who had peafowl on their property trapped several females — or peahens; only the males of peafowl species are actually “peacocks” — and donated them to the parks and recreation department.
The males met the females. Nature took its course. Last weekend, the first chick of the new era hatched.
Janna Hudson, Floyd Lamb’s facilities and events coordinator, pointed out the tiny downy chick as it shadowed its cooing mother this past week around the territory the pair had staked out in the shade of the restored foreman’s house in the park’s historic ranch area.
Hudson said there were about 10 resident free-roaming peafowl, a mix of males and females, at Floyd Lamb when she joined the city in 2020.
But the population dwindled. Hudson speculated that with their free will, some birds may have just left — though they don’t soar, they can fly short distances.
They’re also strong jumpers, which allows them to roost in trees. An ordinance banning park visitors from feeding the animals, and landscaping that made the lowest boughs of the mature shade trees too high even for the birds’ jumping abilities of 6 to 8 feet, could have made the park a less attractive home, she said.
Then two summers ago, a coyote or possibly a hawk might have killed the last two peahens, Hudson said.
“Something happened,” Hudson said. “All they found was a tuft of feathers.”
Word got around city staff about the presumed deaths, and saddened Hudson. Before she worked there, Floyd Lamb was her neighborhood park. Her son’s favorite feature was fishing in the stocked ponds, and hers was the peafowl.
But she chalked up the loss to the harsh realities of nature. Then a television report this winter on the lack of females ignited community feedback that showed that lots of visitors enjoy the birds too.
With its white split-rail fences, verdant grasses and horse trails over some 680 acres near the foot of the Sheep Mountains, this is a rural oasis even with the nearest subdivision just yards from the park’s gates. The park’s soundtrack is the hum of cicadas — and the piercing wail of adult male peacocks. Five of them live in the park, sticking mostly to the ranch area. They’re the iridescent blue variety, the quintessential peacock, sturdy yet elegant, with the dramatic “trains” of tail feathers that they fan out in courtship and dominance displays.
In April, three adult hens moved in. In June, two more, along with about a dozen of their young, followed.
Staff from Gilcrease Nature Sanctuary, which is about a mile from the park, connected to help the city focus on the best care, feeding and community education for the now much-larger population.
At a Las Vegas City Council meeting this month where Councilwoman Nancy Brune honored Hudson and Gilcrease Nature Sanctuary Executive Director Jennifer Langford as Citizens of the Month for their work with the birds, she called it “a magical combination of community engagement, leadership and passion.”
Hudson oversaw the repurposing of an unused barn as a nursery for the transplanted mothers and chicks to get acclimated to the new setting and human caretakers. Students from Arbor View High School shoveled six tons of sand into the horse stalls to make comfortable homes for the feathered families, which will be released to explore the acreage soon.
The females without chicks roamed promptly, and one quickly did what she was brought there to do. The newcomer laid a small clutch in the wood chip landscaping around a gazebo, and although two eggs weren’t viable, one was.
While the birds aren’t domesticated, exactly, they’re accustomed to people and intelligent enough to know who their approved feeders are. (They recognize Hudson’s jingling keychain, she said). The older chicks pick the dried mealworms out of their scratch the way children will pick the marshmallows out of their cereal.
Brune, whose Ward 6 includes the park, said one visitor told her she saw one of the new hens on the ground and refusing to move, and she feared the bird was ill. It turned out that it was the new mother, brooding atop her eggs.
“People are really invested in this park,” Brune said.
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