Iridescence

So, I took these pictures on the same day that I photographed the trees at Althorp. There were two peacocks and both seemed very used to people staring at them.

I was utterly undone by the beauty of their plumage. Whatever the failings of static digital images, I can't complain about how the camera captured these colours.

Famously, the peacock's flamboyance disturbed Charles Darwin. Just the sight of a feather, he wrote in April 1860, “makes me sick!” But it helped him to develop his theory of sexual selection. That does not , though, mean that to a female bird, the beauty is 'merely' a signal of fitness. Carl Safina argues in Becoming Wild, that pleasure in beauty is likely to be the proximal cause for a bird's attraction to the male, even if the distal cause is that signal of fitness. Peahens and humans may share an appreciation for the peacock's aesthetic appeal.

This is hugely important, as I have claimed before. When we see a bird seemingly enjoying bathing, preening, singing, it is not anthropomorphising to describe the bird as experiencing pleasure. Indeed, to use Frans de Waal's term, it would be anthropodenial to refuse to accept that other animals experience pleasure, love, joy, and beauty.