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The staff at the Ryde Hotel are desperately missing out on their favorite residents. It is a gorgeous peacock known to be fawed by a bank lined with orchards on the Sacramento River and naughty wandering around the hotel’s banquet hall.
Guests reported seeing two men pushing the peacock into a cage and loading it into a pickup truck on Saturday, said hotel manager David Nielsen.
The number of heads on Sunday brought in amazing discoveries. Of the dozens of peacocks that make up the local herd, only four were found on the hotel grounds. The Ryde Hotel is located in the California Delta near the countryside community of Walnut Grove and dates back to nearly 140 years.
Alibaba is one of the peacocks that have disappeared from the historic ride hotel in Sacramento County.
(Rafe Goorwitch)
“The area is known as the centre of the Delta. When this first happened, it was a bit shocking,” said Rafe Gowitch, the hotel’s event coordinator. “It was a stab wound in the heart.”
The Sacramento County Sheriff’s Office is investigating a case of a missing peacock and hopes to track down the person in charge and bring the bird home.
“It’s unique in the sense that I’ve never had a peacock caper,” Sgt. Amal Gandhi told the Times. “It’s been investigated by our Property Crime Bureau and it’s a felony based on dollar amounts.”
Gandhi said the male peacock’s estimate (known for its amazing, rainbow tail feathers) is $2,000, while female peacocks are valued at around $1,000.
Nielsen said he was worried that the peacocks were stolen for use in cockfighting. “It’s really upsetting me and it’s really hard to talk about,” he said.
Officials at Ryde Hotel, which regularly supplies 15 peacocks, say only four people have appeared on the hotel grounds. They fear that the rest has been stolen.
(Rafe Goorwitch)
Gandhi said that although peacocks are not normally used in combat, there is a real reason to worry about their welfare.
“They can be used in the black market exotic animal trade, or sometimes even for peacock meat,” he said.
The original Ride Hotel was built in 1886 and is located several yards south of the current structure, according to the Elk Grove Historical Society. The current four-storey Art Deco property was built in 1926 at the height of the ban and was known for its gorgeous speaking-easy basement.
Nielsen said the new owner bought the facility 14 years ago and brought Peafowl and Peahen with him. Since then, several generations of peacocks have enjoyed hotel hospitality.
Currently, around 40 peacocks live in the area, with 15 people coming to the hotel for food every day, Goorwitch said. It took me a few days to realize how severely the population has been shrinking.
“They don’t like smoke and they really didn’t expect 15 hardcore groups to appear because there was a fire here recently,” Goorwitch said. “I wasn’t looking for them, until this guy says that at least one of these guys has been stolen.”
A male peacock, known as Alibaba, shows off his feathers at a ride hotel in Sacramento County. Such birds can earn $2,000, a sheriff’s spokesperson said.
(Rafe Goorwitch)
Of the remaining four peacocks, one lacks several tail feathers, indicating that someone might have tried to take him, Nielsen said. The hotel has installed more cameras throughout the facility to help keep the remaining birds safe.
“Catching a peacock is not easy, it’s like catching a chicken,” Nielsen said. “It’s very rare that many of them were grabbed without making a fuss.”
Gandhi said that because the area is so rural, the sheriff’s office doesn’t have many security cameras and license plate readers that detectives can turn to. Nevertheless, he said the department hopes to be able to use witness accounts and “good, old-fashioned detective work” to find birds.
Go Star in particular lamented that he had no favorite peacock, Alibaba, and had fantastic fans of tail feathers and were not afraid to show off them.
“I know they’re just birds,” he said. “But Alibaba was really special.”
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