Did you know that peacocks can fly?

Today we woke up to weather forecasts of rain. It had also rained a bit during the night. There isn’t much open here on Sundays, but luckily we’d stocked up on bread, cheese, salami, fruit, coffee and juice for breakfast.

At 8am it wasn’t raining but there were a lot of clouds. We were worried about trying a hike and getting caught in bad weather so we went for an hour long drive up the fjord. Along the way we pulled to the side of the road at a random spot in order to take a picture and Leon noticed wild raspberries! Yum!

Continuing up the road after munching on berries, we found that every single bit of the road had a great view in one direction or another. After about 20 km we reached a small town called Rødven which has a stavkirke and a regular kirke, side by side.

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On the way back to the house the weather was still clear. You could see the glacial valley and the small village of Isfjorden clearly over the water (on the left side below — that’s where our AirBnB is).

We were luckily at home when the big rainstorm hit. We sat it out in comfort. In the afternoon the weather cleared up and that’s we had some unusual animal excitement! First we heard a lot of squawking, including the very loud noises that peacocks make. Suddenly we saw a large bird flying through the air at a low altitude. It was a female peacock who somehow got out of the coop in the barn. It crashed into the tree in front of our porch. Once caught up in the trees branches it flailed around flapping for several seconds until it suddenly seemed to give up and just fell to the ground from about 20 feet up. We were all a bit worried that it was injured and so we rushed over. So did the friendly farm cat and the fluffy white dog that had scared it out of the coop in the first place. Luckily the peacock was just in shock for a while and perhaps embarrassed at her terrible flying and tree-landing skills, but seemed otherwise ok after a couple minutes. A brave neighbor picked it up and carried it back to the barn!

So now we have answered the blog question of the day! Yes peacocks can fly but not very high and not very well. I’ll make a separate posting about our afternoon hike.