Boynton Beach Peacocks: When is Beauty Bad?
Anybody want a peacock? How about 200?
The Fox Hollow community in Boynton Beach is considering paying a trapper $6,000 to round up half the neighborhood population of peafowl and kill them.
“I want every one of them out of here,” said resident Dorothy Laswell. “They bang on my French doors, throw themselves at my windows, and wake me up every morning, jumping on my roof at 6 o’clock. And during mating season, they scream and holler.”
Similar complaints have led Fox Hollow to invite a trapper to spend weeks in the neighborhood assessing the population and figuring out what can be done. There are an estimated 400 peafowl living in Fox Hollow, and they have their defenders. So the homeowner’s association is considering a compromise of sorts: eliminating half the bird population.
Story by Frank Cerabino.
Photography by Allen Eyestone/The Palm Beach Post.
The Fox Hollow community in Boynton Beach is proposing to remove a couple of hundred peacocks that live on the gated community’s property. They apparently escaped years ago from nearby Knollwood Groves, where they were an attraction until the groves were torn down for another housing development. Continue reading »
Paradise for the Chickens: Heritage Hen Farms in Boynton Beach
If only you knew just how hard Svetlana and Marty Simon — and their few hundred chickens — worked for each egg they harvest, you’d never look at breakfast the same way.
The Boynton Beach farmers are up at 4 a.m. to feed the animals at their Heritage Hen Farms, change their water, chase the goats to the pasture, clean out the coops, collect eggs, find rogue egg layers, scrub the duck tubs, check the bees, check the fences. Then they go to their day jobs, only to return later for more farm work.
“To produce nutritious food like this takes so much labor,” Svetlana says.
Yes, but it’s paradise for the chickens. The Heritage hens (and geese and ducks and guinea hens and one lone turkey named Thomas) live a truly free-range lifestyle. (Photos by Libby Volgyes)
A sign welcomes visitors to the coop, where families can see firsthand where the eggs come from. Continue reading »
