The Absurd Reality of Raising a Baby Peacock With Toddlers

I'm currently watching my two-year-old daughter attempt to post a piece of heavily chewed toast into the ventilation slat of a heated poultry brooder. Inside that plastic tub sits a bird that cost more than my first car, looking less like a majestic symbol of royal gardens and more like a disgruntled, damp potato. My other twin is busy trying to eat soil from a potted plant, completely oblivious to the fact that our living room now smells faintly of warm wood shavings and regret.

My wife and I thought it would be a brilliant idea to introduce some nature into our Zone 3 London lives. We had this deeply flawed, romanticized vision of the girls running through the garden in flowing linen, trailed by a magnificent blue bird. The reality is that I'm currently sleep-deprived, covered in a mixture of drool and chick starter feed, and desperately trying to keep a microscopic dinosaur alive while simultaneously preventing two toddlers from dismantling the house.

A popular homesteading blog I read late one night suggested I 'involve the children in the magic of hatching,' which I found deeply unhelpful at 3am when both girls were screaming because the bird sneezed loudly. Nobody tells you the truth about the baby peacock experience until you're entirely trapped in it.

What I thought we were getting versus the damp potato

If you've never seen one up close, you might expect a miniature version of the lively adult bird, perhaps with a tiny little crown and some iridescent feathers. This is a massive lie. When they hatch, they're essentially little brown and yellow blobs of fluff that look exactly like baby pheasants, and they stay looking like slightly awkward, gangly partridges for months. Males apparently don't even start showing those blue chest feathers until they're nearly half a year old, and that iconic train takes two or three years to show up.

We unimaginatively named him Baby P, which in hindsight sounds like a controversial 90s rapper, but we were too tired to come up with anything better. Watching him stumble around his enclosure, I realized just how vulnerable these creatures are. They weigh absolutely nothing—barely three ounces at birth—but they grow at a terrifying rate. Within a week or two, this tiny potato suddenly grows flight feathers and can launch itself out of a cardboard box like a furry missile, usually right as you're trying to change a nappy.

The internet is a wasteland of useless information about this. In a moment of late-night desperation, trying to find actual human advice that wasn't written by a robot, I found myself typing "baby peacock before:2022" into Google just to find some dusty old homesteading forum where people still used proper punctuation. I've literally resorted to searching "baby peacock -ai" because if I read one more hallucinated article telling me to feed them marshmallows and positive affirmations, I'm going to throw my laptop into the Thames.

A brief chat about biological warfare

I took the twins in for their standard vaccinations last week and casually mentioned to our GP, Dr. Evans, that we had a peachick in the house. The man stopped writing, slowly lowered his pen, and looked at me over his glasses like I had just confessed to storing uranium in the crisper drawer.

Apparently, mixing toddlers and poultry is a biological disaster waiting to happen. Dr. Evans gently informed me that birds are basically flying petri dishes for things like Salmonella and this terrifying-sounding respiratory thing called Psittacosis. He told me that kids under five have immune systems made of wet tissue paper, and they shouldn't be handling live poultry at all, mostly because toddlers experience the world by putting their grubby little hands directly into their mouths after touching literally anything.

Hearing this sent me into a mild panic spiral. Now I'm constantly washing my hands, washing the girls' hands, and trying to create a sterile perimeter around a box that literally contains a pooping bird. I guess it makes sense, but I sort of assumed natural meant clean, which just goes to show how little I actually understand about biology.

Trying to keep a tiny bird from drowning itself

If you think toddlers have a death wish, wait until you meet a peachick. These birds possess the spatial awareness of a drunk uncle at a wedding. They're incredibly clumsy, and their biggest enemy isn't foxes or the cold—it's their own water bowl.

I learned from my frantic forum reading that a thirsty peachick will just stumble headfirst into a standard water dish, get confused, and drown in half an inch of water. It's the most absurd evolutionary flaw I've ever encountered. You have to buy these specific, ultra-shallow waterers, or do this ridiculous trick where you fill a normal bowl with clean glass marbles so the bird can only drink the water resting between the gaps without falling in. I spent an hour boiling marbles on the stove while my daughters screamed for snacks, wondering where my life had gone so wrong.

Then there's the temperature issue. They're wildly sensitive to drafts. If someone opens the front door too fast, the bird practically catches a cold. You can't just stick them in a box; you need a heat source. But instead of buying a terrifying red heat lamp that'll probably get knocked over by a flying toy and burn your house down, you're better off getting a radiant brooder plate that vaguely mimics a mother bird's body heat so they can tuck themselves under it when they're cold.

They need about ten square feet of adult roaming space eventually, but frankly, that's a problem for next year.

The endless cycle of mess and laundry

Between the bird dust, the wood shavings, and the sheer volume of bodily fluids my twins produce, I'm doing laundry three times a day. Trying to keep the girls clean while navigating farm chores in a terraced house is a losing battle.

This brings me to the only piece of clothing currently surviving the apocalypse in our home: the Organic Cotton Baby Bodysuit. It's my absolute favorite thing we own. The other day, Chloe managed to tip a container of game bird starter feed (which apparently has to be 30% protein, otherwise the bird's legs bend backwards, another terrifying fact I learned at 2am) all over herself. It mixed with her drool to form a sort of cement-like paste.

Because this bodysuit has those brilliant envelope shoulders, I didn't have to pull a cement-covered shirt over her face. I just yanked it straight down her body. It survives a 40-degree wash perfectly, it stretches over her chubby little belly without losing its shape, and the organic cotton doesn't flare up her eczema like the cheap synthetic stuff we bought in a panic at the supermarket. I've washed it maybe forty times, and it hasn't turned rigid or weird yet.

If you're trying to survive the sheer volume of mess that comes with parenting, explore the organic baby clothes collection because having gear that actually withstands the chaos is half the battle.

We also have the Panda Silicone Baby Teether lying around somewhere. It's fine. It's a piece of food-grade silicone shaped like a panda. Does it work? Sure, Isla occasionally gnaws on it instead of biting the coffee table, but it mostly spends its life gathering dust under the sofa until I step on it in the dark while trying to check the brooder temperature.

Accepting my fate

I don't think we'll ever be real homesteaders. We're just tired city parents who accidentally signed up to raise a high-maintenance dinosaur. But watching the girls stare in fascination at this little creature, even from a safe, sanitized distance, does have its moments of quiet magic amidst the crushing exhaustion.

To keep them safely occupied while I'm scrubbing out the brooder with non-toxic cleaner, I usually stick them under the Rainbow Baby Gym. It's a sturdy wooden A-frame with these nice, muted hanging toys. It doesn't sing annoying electronic songs, it looks quite nice in the living room, and more importantly, it pins them to one spot on the rug for exactly six minutes while I manage the farm chores.

If you're considering getting a peachick to enrich your children's lives, my official advice is to buy a nice picture book instead. But if you're already in it, just buy the marbles, wash your hands until they crack, and try to laugh when the bird inevitably escapes and sits on your television.

Before you embark on any more terrible, sleep-deprived ideas, shop the Kianao baby essentials collection to at least get the right gear for the human children in your house.

A few messy answers to your bird-related panic

Can my toddler pet the peachick if we use hand sanitizer after?
According to my GP's horrified reaction, absolutely not. Hand sanitizer is great, but toddlers are notoriously bad at not touching their faces, and the risk of Salmonella is just too high. We enforce a strict "looking only" policy, which usually results in tantrums, but I'd rather deal with a screaming two-year-old than a toddler with a severe bacterial infection.

What the hell do these things actually eat?
Not chicken feed, which is what I originally bought. From what I understand from staring at feed bags, they need a specific game bird starter that's packed with around 28-30% protein. If they don't get enough protein and calcium, their bones grow wrong because they expand so quickly in the first few weeks. It smells weird, but it keeps them alive.

Do I really need a brooder plate instead of a lamp?
I highly think the plate. Heat lamps get insanely hot, they dry out the air, and if a toddler throws a wooden block at one and shatters the bulb, you've got a massive fire hazard. The brooder plate just sits there quietly warming the bird like a mechanical mother hen, and you don't have to sleep with one eye open worrying your house is going to burn down.

Are they loud when they're babies?
They don't do that horrific screaming you hear at stately homes quite yet, but they do make a persistent, high-pitched peeping noise, especially if they're slightly too cold, slightly too warm, hungry, bored, or just feeling conversational at 4am.

When can they go outside permanently?
They have to be fully feathered, which takes about eight weeks, and the weather needs to be reliably warm. We tried moving the brooder near an open window on a breezy day and the bird looked at me like I had betrayed its trust, so we're keeping it indoors where it can continue to ruin my skirting boards until summer.