Madison Heights gets new fine-feathered friend

Madison Heights gets all kinds. First, a goat. Now a peacock.

Locals may remember the famous “Madison Heights Goat,” which lived on the hill above the John Lynch Bridge. Then in 1999, she was killed in a car accident, and the hillside has seemed empty.

No longer. A peacock is poised to take the goat’s place as the area’s unofficial mascot.

Rodney Bell of Madison Heights first noticed the peacock near his home off Old Wright Shop Road about a year and a half ago.

Since then, the peacock has become a sort of neighborhood pet. Everyone in the area feeds him, said Bell, who reported the bird’s favorite food is sunflower seeds.

Neighbor Walter Ogden says that, despite one drawback, no one in the neighborhood finds the bird a nuisance.

“Everybody up here likes him,” he says, “even though sometimes he sounds like a truck horn.”

The peacock, dubbed “Charlie” by neighbor Maudena Moore, seems perfectly at home, wandering from one porch to another along Old Wright Shop Road.

“He’s the whole neighborhood’s pet,” Moore says. “He goes everywhere.

“But sometimes, if I whistle, he’ll come.”

Moore said she always leaves a pan of water out for Charlie.

“He’ll come by about 8:30 every night, and I’ll feed him,” she said. “Then, he goes across the street to a tree to roost.”

Moore said that she feeds the peacock crackers and scraps.

No one who takes care of the peacock has any idea where he came from. The closest peacocks are in Stapleton, Bell said, but he doesn’t know of any that are missing.

“One day he just showed up in the yard,” Moore said. “He scared me at first.”

Moore said that she sometimes worries about the peacock’s safety, living so close to the road.

“He’s gotten a few pretty close calls,” she said. “When the cars honk at him to get out of the road, he just stands there and hollers at them.”

Bell said that, since most people driving through the neighborhood know about the peacock, they slow down and check for him. That includes Lynchburg City buses, he said, which ease up on the gas and check for the peacock as they drive by.

Even if drivers didn’t watch out for him, he said, the peacock seems safe.

“He’s a very smart bird,” Bell said. “He looks both ways before crossing the street.”

Charlie’s become a bit of a celebrity.

“A lot of people will stop and try to take pictures of him,” Bell said.

At one point during the early ’90s, the game warden did try to capture the Madison Heights Goat. Bart Shaw, supervisor of Amherst Animal Control, said that, unless there were complaints about the bird, it seemed unlikely officials would have any reason to want to catch the peacock.

Ordinarily, Shaw said, poultry and fowl wouldn’t be allowed to run loose.

“But if the people in the neighborhood are feeding it, they’re basically taking possession of it,” he said, which would put the peacock out of animal control’s scope.

To those who are concerned about the peacock suffering the same fate as the goat, Christy Hughes, of the Amherst County Humane Society, saidthe peacock was as safe on the hill as it would be anywhere.

“Peacocks are naturally wild fowl,” Hughes said. “They are very durable animals, and can survive on insects, plants, and even small animals.”

Hughes said the only thing of possible concern was that peacocks tend to fly low, which could cause trouble if the peacock flew into the path of a car. She said the chance of that happening was relatively low, however, since peacocks are extremely intelligent birds.

As to where the bird came from, Hughes, who once owned a peacock herself, says it may have been purchased from somewhere nearby, and found the hill in an attempt to return home.

“If you get a full-grown peacock, they often try to go back where they came from, like chickens or even cats,” she said.

Hughes warned against attempting to catch the peacock. The birds tend to keep their distance from people, she said.

“They tend to stay 2 to 3 feet away, just out of self-preservation. You’re not going to catch one.”

Additionally, Hughes said, people who want to catch the bird or to get a closer look could end up endangering it, since the bird could fly into the road in an attempt to escape. Peacocks are not pets.

“We’ve domesticated them because we like the way they look,” she said. Really though, “they are wild animals.”