Waiting for the Bus

So, this morning while waiting at the corner of Van Buren and State Street for the bus to bring me from the Lower East Side, where I'm staying (in the part of Milwaukee that still deserves the title 'Cream City'), to Marquette, I saw a peacock cross the road.

 This was surprising, given that downtown Milwaukee's not the sort of place where I'd expect to see an exotic animal wandering around --especially a tropical one, given the bitter cold weather we'd had here last week. I assumed it was an escaped pet, though it certainly seemed very much at ease in its surroundings. Then a second one came and joined it, coming like the first out of the Yankee Hill complex, crossing Van Buren (a major street; luckily traffic was light) and making its way over to a green grassy spot between two apartment complexes.

I asked after I got to the Archives, and they were as surprised as I was by the unlikeliness of free-roaming peacocks in Milwaukee. I asked again at the front desk of the hotel, and the desk clerk said no, he'd never heard of peacocks roaming about, but they did have wild turkeys in the neighborhood.

So that's it. I got to see something really neat -- just not what I thought it was. And at the cost of thinking that Mr. Lacy and Dr. Rogers, who used to take me out birdwatching with them sometimes back in my Scouting days, wd be sadly disappointed if they knew about my decayed bird-identification skills.

--John R.
--working on: Council of Elrond drafts (days) and a book review (evenings)
--current reading: pre-Columbo Dr. Thorndyke stories by R. Austin Freeman (1912)


UPDATE (W. March 28th)
And here's a local news story about Milwaukee's fashionable East Side's urban wild turkeys:
http://fox6now.com/2013/12/17/seven-wild-turkeys-seemingly-move-in-to-east-side-neighborhood/
--JDR