09/08/2026
The peachick is a boy! He fanned out his little tail feathers yesterday and was shaking them around like he’s a big man, but he’s really just a bit bigger than a chicken 🤣 We’ve been calling him Poppy, but it’s more like Papi now- which is Spanish slang for buddy, daddy or “my man” 😎
Papi is a piebald or pied peacock. So it will be interesting to see what his true colors are when he’s an adult, but that might take two years….
The first picture is a picture of him right now, and the other pictures are of adult pie peacocks, and what he could look like in the future…..
If you want to know more about what that means here is a little bit about genetics from Stickies Peafowl Genetics 201
Pied birds are not albino. Albinism is the absence of melanin production in the body and applies ONLY to birds who fail to produce melanin. Albinos will lack color in their skin and eyes, not just their feathers.
Leucism, on the other hand, is a failure to properly deposit pigment (all pigments) on the feathers due to the failure of pigment cells to move to their proper location on the body from the neural crest. Leucism affects only the feathers of the bird, leaving the skin and eyes normal colored. Partial leucism results in the pied coloration (in any bird, not just peafowl. Wild pied or piebald birds can be found, but are very rare and usually are killed quickly by predators or do not get to breed because they don't look right).
Because leucism is a failure of the color to be put into place, not a failure of the color to exist, it is possible for white birds (and pied birds) to exist with other colors and other patterns. A white bird may also be genotypically a purple bird, or a bronze bird, but the 'white' would mask these colors completely because the pigment for them would not be deposited on the feathers. Thus, a bird could genotypically be purple or bronze or any other color, but would phenotypically be white.
