Crossword clues for peafowl
Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
The Collaborative International Dictionary
Peafowl \Pea"fowl`\, n. [See Peacock.] (Zo["o]l.) The peacock or peahen; any species of Pavo.
Wiktionary
n. (context rare English) A pheasant of the genus ''Pavo'' or ''Afropavo'', notable for the extravagant tails of the males; a peacock. The cry is "meow" (like cats), "kee-o" or "iyaan".
WordNet
n. very large terrestrial southeast Asian pheasant often raised as an ornamental bird [syn: bird of Juno]
Wikipedia
The peafowl include two Asiatic bird species (the blue or Indian peafowl originally of India and Sri Lanka and the green peafowl of Myanmar, Indochina, and Java) and one African species (the Congo peafowl native only to the Congo Basin) of bird in the genera Pavo and Afropavo of the Phasianidae family, the pheasants and their allies, known for the male's piercing call and, among the Asiatic species, his extravagant eye-spotted tail covert feathers which he displays as part of a courtship ritual. The term peacock is properly reserved for the male; the female is known as a peahen, and the immature offspring are sometimes called peachicks.
The functions of the elaborate iridescent colouration and large "train" of peacocks have been the subject of extensive scientific debate. Charles Darwin suggested they served to attract females, and the showy features of the males had evolved by sexual selection. More recently, Amotz Zahavi proposed in his handicap theory that these features acted as honest signals of the males' fitness, since less fit males would be disadvantaged by the difficulty of surviving with such large and conspicuous structures.
Usage examples of "peafowl".
Prince again slept under the apple-tree and awoke just before midnight to hear the whirr of wings and see the nine peafowl come flying down from the sky.
She jumped up, lifted her arms above her head, changed into a peafowl, and without another word flew off with the other eight and vanished in the sky.
Prince and his man wandered hither and thither over the world inquiring everywhere for news of nine peafowl one of whom was a lovely maiden.
Then to-morrow morning when you go down to the lake with him to see the nine peafowl slip it out and blow it on the back of his neck.
The next morning down at the lake just as the nine peafowl came flying into sight he crept up behind the Prince and blew the bellows on the back of his neck.
Prince sank into a deep sleep from which the ninth peafowl was unable to arouse him.
Prince waited for the appearance of the nine peafowl he galloped madly along the shore of the lake hoping in this way to ward off the strange sleep.
But the moment the nine peafowl appeared in the sky he was so delighted that he drew rein and the treacherous serving man was able to slip up behind him and blow the magic bellows on his neck.
So again he slept soundly while the ninth peafowl fluttered about his head and tried vainly to arouse him.
Never again would she be changed into a peafowl at the whim of a wicked dragon, never again be separated from her loved one.
Royal Navy called this place HMS Peafowl, the sailors called it HMS Piss-up.
I looked up as I ran under some trees, otherwise peafowl might excrete on me.
I took up a shot gun, and, ordering the elephant to follow, strolled across some fields to a low scrub-covered hill where I thought I might pick up a few partridges or a peafowl before dusk.
Leaving her on the marble bench, with its carvings of pheasants and peafowl and flowers that had not blossomed here in ten summers, Ingold bundled the horrible kill into one of the hempen sacks he habitually carried, and hung the thing from the branch of a sycamore dying at the edge of the slunch, wreathed in such spells as would keep rats and carrion feeders at bay until they could collect it on their outward journey.
The sun was shining, the birds singing, the fountains splashing, the peafowl strutting before he had mounted the dais to his bed, too exhausted to hunt out his pajamas from whatever mammoth mahogany commode they had been placed in by the newly attentive servants.