Watch out beauty of white peacock at Ramakrishna Math, Bangalore. Everyone has hidden beauty and music; we just need to explore them.
Indian Peacocks or peafowl have been domesticated for about 3000 years. The male Indian Peafowl, commonly known as the peacock. Life expectancy is generally considered to be 15-20 years. The male peacock sports about 150 of the long "eyed" peacock tail feathers.
These large, brightly colored birds have a distinctive crest and an unmistakable ornamental train. The train (1.4-1.6 meters in length) accounts for more than 60% of their total body length (2.3 meters). The train is formed by 100-150 highly specialized uppertail-coverts.
Peafowl are forest birds that nest on the ground but roost in trees.
Peafowl are omnivorous and eat most plant parts, flower petals, seed heads, insects and other arthropods, reptiles, and amphibians.
Feather of Peacock
These feathers are shed annually during the molt. These feathers grow to be several feet long but are shed each year just after the breeding season and regrown in the following season. Each of these long feathers also has a design near its tip which resembles an eye.
Colour of Peacock Feather
The feathers of the peacock are composed of many colors including the crescent sheen of bright blue and green. The shimmering color of the peacock feather is due to phenomena known as interference. Each feather consists of tiny flat branches. This same principle is also responsible for vibrant shimmering colors of butterflies, pheasants, birds of paradise and humming birds.
Feather structure is as important to colour as pigment. Each feather consists of thousands of flat branches, each with minuscule bowl-shaped indentations. At the bottom of each indentation is a lamellae (thin plate-like layers), that acts like a prism, splitting light.
White Peacock
The white feathers on a peacock depend on which genes are dominant and which are recessive. They do not have any pigmentation. Any animal can be albino, but what separates an albino from a white peacock is the colour of the skin beneath its feathers. A white peacock has coloured skin whereas an albino's skin will be very pale and without any markings.
There is a variety of peacock with all white feathers. These are not albino but a color variation of the India Blue peacock. Albino animals and birds have a complete lack of color and red or pink eyes. White peafowl have blue eyes. Indian peafowl of all colors, including white, have pink skin.
The colors in the feathers of a bird are determined two factors: pigment and structure. For example, the green in some parrots is a result of yellow pigments over blue-reflecting feathers. In the case of a white peacock, its unusual lack-of-color is due to a missing pigment. This missing pigment is dark and absorbs incident light, making diffracted and interference light visible. The effect is similar to that of oil on water.
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