Princess with Peacock: Free Printable PDF Sheet for Kids

Princesses & Peacocks: History & Fun Facts

Quick Facts

• A male peacock’s tail train can grow up to 6 feet (1.8 m) long — about 60% of the bird’s total length.
• Peacock feathers have no blue or green pigment; the colors come from microscopic crystal structures that scatter light.
• The Mughal emperor Shah Jahan commissioned the famous Peacock Throne in 1635; it was covered in 108 rubies, 116 emeralds, and over 200 other gems.
• Peacocks can run at speeds of up to 10 mph (16 km/h) and can fly short distances despite the weight of their trains.
• A group of peafowl is called a muster or a party.

Peacocks have attracted human admiration for more than 3,000 years. Ancient Phoenician traders transported them from South Asia to Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean as exotic luxury goods. King Solomon of Jerusalem, according to the Hebrew Bible, received peacocks among the valuable imports from the land of Ophir, alongside gold, silver, apes, and sandalwood. Greek and Roman poets praised the peacock’s tail as the most beautiful sight in the natural world, and the Roman goddess Juno — queen of the gods — adopted the bird as her symbol because its tail, covered in what appeared to be eyes, symbolized an all-seeing divine watchfulness.

Peacock Feather Colors and Structure

What makes peacock feathers remarkable to scientists is that they contain no true blue or green pigment. Instead, each feather is built with microscopic arrays of melanin rods and air-filled spaces that scatter and reflect light through a process called structural coloration. The same physics that makes a soap bubble iridescent creates the brilliant turquoise-blue of a peacock’s neck and the shifting emerald of its train. Arrange the microstructure differently and the color vanishes — peacock feathers look dull brown in certain lighting conditions. The eye markings at the feather tips, called ocelli, use this same iridescent structure to create a golden ring around a deep blue center.

Peacocks in Indian Royal Culture

India made the peacock its national bird in 1963, a formal recognition of a bond that stretches back into antiquity. The Maurya Empire (321–185 BCE) — the first empire to unify most of the Indian subcontinent — chose the peacock as a symbol on its coins and palace walls. The Sanskrit word for peacock, mayura, appears repeatedly in ancient texts, and the peacock figures prominently in Hindu mythology as the mount of the god Kartikeya (Murugan). Mughal court painters of the 16th and 17th centuries produced detailed naturalist portraits of peacocks as part of emperor Akbar’s project to document every animal in his kingdom, creating some of the finest bird illustrations produced anywhere in the world before modern photography.

Peacocks in European Royal Gardens

When European monarchs began establishing menageries — collections of exotic animals — in their palace gardens during the medieval and Renaissance periods, peacocks were among the most common and visible residents. The French kings at Versailles kept peacocks roaming freely in the formal gardens. Hampton Court Palace in England had peacocks in its grounds for centuries. Peacocks were practical as well as decorative — their shrill warning call served as an alarm when strangers approached the grounds. That combination of beauty and usefulness made them ideal palace birds, and they remained a fixture of European royal gardens from the medieval period through the 19th century.