17/09/2026
Peacocks that arrive from the wild…
Here comes a long story.
It’s happened twice now in my life… once when living at Bowden House, and early in July here at the Hillyfield. Two instances 20 years apart, and despite the striking beauty of such a bird and the bizarre surprise of wandering in from the wild… which really is quite miraculous… both times it has caused quite some upset.
At BowdEn house, when I decided that I wanted to become a full-time member of the community, I offered as a gift to the place a breeding pair of peacocks. This offer was received as if I had proposed to make a present of some awful disease.
in fact, the abject horror of such an idea caused the then owner to make changes in the deeds of the land for anyone buying into the community that there would never be a Peacock or a cockerel on the estate. Such force of determination surprised me to the point of falling off my chair, but I did not mind signing given that I didn’t believe such a covenant could actually hold Place in law.
It seemed that the universe agreed when out of the Blue, just a few days after signing, a fully fledged male Peacock arrived on the estate.
One by one members of the Community came up to me to ask whether I had secretly bought the Peacock onto the Land, understandable but not what had happened.
This year, 20 years later, another Peacock has turned up unannounced in my life.
As you can see in the photograph above his favourite perch was on top of the massive steampunk wood burner we have in the corner of our workshop.
But what the picture doesn’t show is the significant about of Bird poo all over the workshop floor. In fact His favourite place to stand in the mornings was directly in front of the kitchen door. Which inevitably meant people Walking a sticky mess throughout the kitchen resulting in a difficult operation of scrubbing and swearing to get the place clean.
Very quickly this relationship became far from welcome to most of the team.
However, rather than going along with the consensus that the peacock should be relocated or eaten I begged to take a rather radical step in managing the fowl creature.
You see, I’ve booked onto a course in October called ‘Subtle Energies of the Land’, inspired by a talk by Patrick Mcmannaway that I had attended at the Oxford Real Farming Conference ‘listening to the land’ early this Spring.
This workshop is geared to helping fine-tune farmers to be able to communicate directly with the ‘spirit’ of the land and all the life-forms that make up our vast eco-system.
I had heard stories where Patrick had effectively communicated with golden Eagles to reduce the cost for a chicken farm in the USA. Of sweet talking crocodiles in Australia and improving the croc-business turnover by more than $1 million through encouraging the owners to play classical music in the crocodile egg hatchery, and in another farm persuading the farmer to make friends and open up a dynamic conversation with the wild dingos who had been killing his cattle. 
All of these stories inspired me to ask my team for patience while I tried to open up a conversation with the Peacock.
Each night I would close my eyes and relax, drifting into a space of gratitude and appreciation whilst also holding a clear  invitation for the Peacock to stay on the condition that it stopped making a mess of the barn. I quickly discovered that it did not feel right to speak in negatives. Instead I turned my vision to a clean Barn, and the Peacock happily eating with the Chickens.
In an effort to do something practical as well as engage in the esoteric, I put a small pile of grubs closer to the chicken run each day.
As if by magic, within 3 days he has stopped roosting in the barn, no mess on the floor, and he’s now harmoniously making some feathered friends. 
I share this because it’s opening up and reminding me of the magic that we all co-exist as… and that with any challenge we find we are in, there is almost always a different way of approaching it which might come to a mutually beneficial solution.
Have you had a similar experience in your life?
The Hillyfield
