It is a well known fact that peacocks do not really like cold or damp weather! They certainly are not keen when it snows, as then it is both cold and damp. We have indoor space for all our peacocks. However not all the peacocks choose to use it when when it is really cold. We recently woke up to huge snow drifts and the path to the peacock pens was filled with massive snow drifts of up to four feet high.

However despite the snow drifts we had to get to the peacock pens. We needed to get thepeacocks fresh water as their water buckets would be frozen over and check they had enough food for the cold days.

But first we had to dig our way to the peacocks!

As the cold spell lasted for a while we started to bring the water buckets inside at night to prevent them from freezing. Changing frozen water and breaking your way through the thick ice is so much harder work than just changing water!

It was so cold!

When the temperatures plummeted at night, I go out to check on the peacocks. Most would be inside in the warm. A few hardy birds would be sat on the perches with snow on their backs getting cold. Some nights the temperetature fell as low as minus 12 degrees! During this freezing weather spell I would go outside at night after the peacocks had settled down for the night. I would move all the peacocks perching outside into their inside pens.

This strategy worked well with all the peacocks except the Java Green peacocks. No mater how cold it was these peacocks would sit outside on their perches. Even though they had snow or ice forming on their backs. As Java Peafowl are so much more susceptible to the cold, this was very worrying. However, no matter how hard I tried I could not get the Java Green Peafowl into the warm inside pens at night.

Luckily, the peacocks do not seem to have suffered any long term damamge as a result. The really cold spells of weather in the UK do not last for long. We were delighted that we did not suffer any casualties and all the peacocks including the Java Green Peafowl were fine. But it was a long, hard, tough week at Peacocks UK.