Tiruchy: Peacock found electrocuted

TIRUCHY: In what came as a rude shock for environmentalists here, a three-year-old peacock was found electrocuted at a residential area in the city.Residents of Raja Colony near the collectorate here found the carcass of the bird lying on a field located near an electric transformer. They alerted forest department officials, who arrived the spot and removed the bird.Soon it was removed from the spot and buried at the Reserve Forest in Thangachi Kurichi.Forester, Saravana Kumar, said, “The bird should have come from Ukyyankondan river in search of food and must have sat on one of the transformers in Raja Colony. The live wire had probably touched its plumage and the bird was killed,” he said.“Since there are several peacock habitats across the city, the birds enter the residential areas where people feed them,” he said. “The bird should have sat at a transformer near an apartment in the expectation of getting food,” Saravana Kumar said.Though peahens too fly along with peacocks, the peacocks alone fall victims as their plumage use to contact live wire freely.Similar incidents had taken place at Tiruvanaikoil and Cantonment recently, and so the forest department had appealed to the TNEB to erect wire mesh across the city to avoid such incidences.“We are also creating an awareness among the residents in the apartments not to feed the birds, because it is food that attracts them to cross the live electric wires causing their death,” Saravana Kumar added.Previously, On May, 2011, a mass death of peacocks was reported in the district after a farmer had poisoned the birds that reportedly damaged his crops.