peacocks (was HPfGU "Lucius, Lucius, Lucius")

[Catlady (Rita Prince Winston)]

--- In <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HPforGrownups/post>,
"pippin_999" <foxmoth at ...> wrote:

> Catlady: 
> > Peacocks aren't that expensive. 
> 
> Pippin:
> No, but they're showy and not otherwise useful. The tent at the QWC 
> with the peacocks in front no doubt belonged to the Malfoys. Wizards
> who keep them would use silencing charms; their cries could be 
> mistaken for that "piteous human scream" that Draco made. They go on
> all night in season.
> 
> Pippin
> whose neighbor used to keep them
>

My first draft mentioned that peacocks are loud. I wondered if Lucius
would put a silencing spell around them not to protect himself from
disturbance, but to protect Muggle neighbors from hints of wizarding
presence. How big is Lucius's estate anyway? It's hard to think that
wizards could hide an estate big enough that peacock cries wouldn't
reach past its borders.

When I was a child long ago in Pacific Palisades, it was a suburb so
quiet that sometimes late at night, if I got quiet myself, I could
hear the surf sloshing and sloshing a mile away (and 50-some feet
down). There were IIRC people who owned peacocks a bit more than a
mile away in pretty much the opposite direction, and we didn't have to
get very quiet to hear the peafowl calls.

My recollection is that they had like three different calls, altho' I
never got efficient and took notes of when I heard each call, so I
don't know if they correlated with the time of the year, the phase of
the moon, the tides.... My recollection is one call my mother called
'screaming' which sounded like angry (not piteous) human screams.
Another my mother called 'mewing' which sounded like ... seagulls make
a similar cry, except nowhere so loud. And another that was just
hideous. Nowdays I'd think it like an especially obnoxious car alarm.