Audubon arrows
aim for peacocks

Every once in a blue moon a newspaper columnist wakes up to find the story of his dreams sitting before him like a big, fat turkey on a platter.

There was a blue moon last week -- the second full moon in a one-month period -- and Herman, the little known "Blue Moon God," sent a lovely little item fluttering into my lap, a story full of irony, pathos, caprice and several other big writing-type words.

It appears (down goosebumps) that the head of conservation at the Waimea Valley Audubon Center -- that lush wildlife preserve on the North Shore (here we go) allowed professional archers ( wait for it) to hunt down and kill (ho, baby) ... the center's ... peacocks! (Bless you, Herman.)

To recap: At a North Shore nature preserve named after one of the most famous bird-lovers in the history of mankind, people with bows and arrows were allowed, nay, ordered, to stalk and kill exotic 3-foot high birds whose exquisite tail feathers are one of the glories of the cosmos.

I have been known to make up one or two (or several hundred) things in this space but never would I try to pass off a story like this as fact. But it is.

In all, nine peacocks were killed at the Audubon Center. Only two were killed by arrows. The others were humanely captured and (Go, Herman, go!) decapitated.

I've got to sit down for a minute. Whew. OK. It seems that someone at the center decided too many of the beautiful birds were roaming around, annoying guests and disturbing the eco-balance of the place and so it was decided to "cull" the peacock population. There are all kinds of ways to "cull" a group of peacocks. You can buy bus passes for them and send them to town. You can stick them in the car trunks of park visitors when they aren't looking. Or you can just, well, kill the buggers. So why use bow and arrows? Well, napalm's out. Hand grenades, too. And it's illegal to use guns to kill exotic, albeit annoying, wildlife in a public nature park.

The guy who organized the peacock cull, Lance La Pierre, the center's conservation manager, could not be reached for comment because he is off on a bunny hunt. Just kidding. He strategically just wasn't around to answer a bunch of sarcastic questions from reporters. ( If I were La Pierre, I'd just ask the whiny reporters what THEY would do if their living room were suddenly overrun by enormous poultry.)

It's actually not that ironic that the peacock purge happened under the flag of Audubon. Everyone knows that 19th-century naturalist John James Audubon killed more birds than Col. Sanders. He sketched thousands of pictures of fowl, but they wouldn't sit still while he drew so he had to "immobilize" them. This he did with his special, environmentally friendly immobilizing rifle.

So there you go. An eco-tale for the ages. Blue Moon God Herman says to pick up your souvenir feathers in the gift shop on your way out.