In modern Hebrew the word for peacock is "tavas". The Ancient Hebrew word tuki (plural tukkiyim) has been said to have been derived from the Tamil tokei but sometimes traced to the Egyptian tekh. The Greek word for peacock was taos and was related to the Persian "tavus" (as in Takht-i-Tâvus for the famed Peacock Throne ). It is debated that the nomenclature of the Maurya Empire, whos first emperor Chandragupta Maurya was raised and influenced by peacock farmers, was named after the terminology.
The Sanskrit, later Pali, and modern Hindi term for the animal is maur. Chaucer (1343–1400) used the word to refer to a proud and ostentatious person in his simile " proud a pekok" in Troilus and Criseyde (Book I, line 210). The current spelling was established in the late 17th century. The earliest usage of the word in written English is from around 1300 and spelling variants include pecok, pekok, pecokk, peacocke, peacock, pyckock, poucock, pocok, pokok, pokokke, and poocok among others. The Indian peafowl is listed as of Least Concern on the IUCN Red List.Ĭarl Linnaeus in his work Systema Naturae in 1758 assigned to the Indian peafowl the technical name of Pavo cristatus (means "crested peafowl" in classical Latin). The bird is celebrated in Hindu and Greek mythology, and is the national bird of India. Despite extensive study, opinions remain divided on the mechanisms involved. In the 20th century, Amotz Zahavi argued that the train was a handicap, and that males were honestly signalling their fitness in proportion to the splendour of their trains. His later explanation, sexual selection, is widely but not universally accepted. In the 19th century, Charles Darwin found it a puzzle, hard to explain through ordinary natural selection. The function of the peacock's elaborate train has been debated for over a century. They forage on the ground in small groups and usually try to escape on foot through undergrowth and avoid flying, though they fly into tall trees to roost. Their loud calls make them easy to detect, and in forest areas often indicate the presence of a predator such as a tiger. The Indian peafowl lives mainly on the ground in open forest or on land under cultivation where they forage for berries, grains but also prey on snakes, lizards, and small rodents. Peahens lack the train, have a white face and iridescent green lower neck, and dull brown plumage. Despite the length and size of these covert feathers, peacocks are still capable of flight. These stiff feathers are raised into a fan and quivered in a display during courtship. The peacock is brightly coloured, with a predominantly blue fan-like crest of spatula-tipped wire-like feathers and is best known for the long train made up of elongated upper-tail covert feathers which bear colourful eyespots. Indian peafowl display a marked form of sexual dimorphism. Male peafowl are referred to as peacocks, and female peafowl are referred to as peahens, although both sexes are often referred to colloquially as a "peacock". It has been introduced to many other countries. The Indian peafowl ( Pavo cristatus), also known as the common peafowl, and blue peafowl, is a peafowl species native to the Indian subcontinent.
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