NNormally, country dwellers are awakened in the morning by the roosters screeching. But not the Veith family. As soon as the sun rises and it begins to get dark outside, the morning stillness is broken by a shrill scream, sometimes high, sometimes low. A peacock has settled on the roof of the terraced house in Petterweil, a quiet district of Karben. He has been causing unrest since early June.
“Does your house have visitors?” asks Gottfried Friedrich, a neighbor of the Veith family. With its head held high, the peacock sits on the roof, gazes into the distance and responds to any sound with a sharp turn of its narrow, elongated neck.
The residents returned from vacation in mid-June. “Right at the beginning it was something very special for all of us to have such an exotic bird on our own roof,” says Astrid Veith. But the enthusiasm quickly gave way to excitement. According to Petterweil residents, the peacock escaped from the small aviary at a nearby golf club because a student on a school trip allegedly failed to close the cage door properly. Since then, the bird with the colored feathers has been sitting on the roof of the Veiths. Both the local residents and the owner of the golf club assumed until the end that the peacock would “go down on its own at some point”. But time passed and the graceful peacock stayed. He continues to bask in the sunlight on the edge of the row of houses when he’s not marching across the neighboring rooftops.
Six fire engines in action
Because the sun’s rays strongly warm the roof, local residents have begun to worry about the peacock’s health. On a Friday, Friedrich Veith called the public order office with the unusual request to remove the peacock from his roof. As Veith recounts, the local police were at the front door a few days later. It was the beginning of a five-hour police operation. Six fire engines from Petterweil and Ober-Erlenbach, police, veterinarian and owners all tried to catch the swift bird. Passers-by suspected an emergency because the country road had to be closed because of the fire engines.
First, the firefighters tried a net. But the peacock was more intelligent than expected: it ran from one side of the house to the other, and all attempts to catch it in the net were in vain. Even a flying drone could not follow his paths. Then the vet came with tranquilizer darts and tried seven times to hit the peacock. But he only hit a feather. “The peacock has established itself here,” says Astrid Veith. Only at night does the bird sometimes hop from balcony to balcony down into the garden, but quickly returns to the roof.
Nobody knows what will happen next. Another police operation is not yet planned. Gottfried Friedrich, the neighbor, now does guided tours for anyone who is interested. The peacock sits confidently there on the hot roof: “Go home, it must be much nicer there than here,” says Friedrich to him.
Despite all the inconveniences, the big bird also has a pleasant side effect for the residents: since the peacock settled on the roof, there are considerably fewer pigeons in the neighborhood.
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