India made the peacock its national bird, then lost the paperwork

In May 2011 the Ministry of Environment and Forests issued a notification that announced nothing new. It re-announced something every Indian schoolchild had been taught for almost fifty years. The reason is in the second sentence.

The Government of India had notified 'Tiger' and 'Peacock' as 'National Animal' and 'National Bird' respectively. However, the said notifications of the Government of India are not forthcoming in the official records of the Ministry of Environment and Forests for quite some time.

"Not forthcoming in the official records" is civil service for we cannot find it. So on 30 May 2011, under file number 25-1/2008-WL-I, the ministry re-notified the tiger and the peacock. The file number is worth a glance. The 2008 in it means the file sat open for three years before anybody produced a page.

Nor was this quietly tidied up afterwards. In July 2019 the Rajya Sabha asked what actually makes India's national symbols official. The government's answer was that the environment ministry notified the tiger and peacock "through notifications issued in 2011". Not 1963. Asked on the record, the state points at a document written to replace one nobody can find.

So what happened in the 1960s, and why is the answer everyone repeats so hard to pin down?

The title was never meant to be an honour

The idea did not come from Delhi, and its original purpose was close to the opposite of what India did with it.

The scanned volumes of the Newsletter for Birdwatchers, the bulletin Zafar Futehally started in 1960, are sitting on the Internet Archive. The 1961 volume carries a short piece explaining where the scheme came from. It was recommended by the International Council for Bird Preservation at its world conference in Tokyo in May 1960, and its purpose was

to pinpoint public interest and attention to some particular bird species that stood in the greatest need of protection in each country, especially where it was threatened with extinction owing to public apathy or direct human persecution.

A national bird was meant to be a distress flag. The same piece is blunt that this was the only sense ever intended: the idea "was never intended in the sense of a national emblem, which all countries, including our own, already possess", and had nothing to do with whether the bird was "particularly ornamental or of mythological, sentimental or similar significance". Those three words are, almost exactly, the reasons every article gives for why India picked the peacock. The man writing knew that, and he was not pleased.

Salim Ali called it meaningless, in print, in 1961

The piece is signed by Salim Ali, and not as a private enthusiast. He signs as Chairman of the Indian National Section of the International Council for Bird Preservation, which is to say the man who represented India to the body that invented the idea.

In this context, I submit that the selection of the Peacock by the Indian Board for Wild Life is totally misconceived and meaningless.

Notice the date. He is writing in 1961 and objecting to something that has already happened, while every account you will ever read puts the decision in 1963.

He wanted the Great Indian Bustard, "a large and spectacular bird, indigenous to India, whose numbers, in spite of the legislative ban on its killing, are dwindling at an alarming rate". It needed, he wrote, "an urgent nation-wide effort to save the bird from its impending doom".

By the rules as written he was plainly right. The bustard was found nowhere else and was already sliding. The peacock was in no danger from anything.

Why the bustard actually lost

If you have heard anything about this episode, it is that the bustard was passed over because officials feared "bustard" would be misspelt, or said out loud, as something obscene. It is repeated everywhere as established fact. It is not one.

The naturalist M. Krishnan published an account of the deliberations that names the three birds seriously in contention, the Sarus Crane, the Great Indian Bustard and the Brahminy Kite, and gives the reason each was dropped. They are strikingly bureaucratic. The Sarus went because "it is not an all-India bird and millions of our countrymen do not know it". The Brahminy Kite went because a very similar looking bird was already another country's emblem, meaning the American bald eagle. The bustard was disqualified on the same distribution problem, and because for all that it is "big and heavy and impressive", it "does not lend itself readily to formalised depiction".

So the bustard lost because it does not live everywhere in India and does not draw well on a letterhead. The single argument in its favour was Salim Ali's, that the bird was dying. Nothing about spelling.

Krishnan also settles the date. The Board's discussion, he writes, "only resulted in the peacock being suggested provisionally as the National Bird, and some further time elapsed before this recommendation was accepted and became final". Provisional by 1961, final in 1963. Both dates are real, and the popular version has flattened two events into one, which is why nothing about this story has ever quite lined up.

That passage also quietly sources something else. There is a famous list of criteria the selectors supposedly worked to, reproduced word for word across hundreds of pages and cited by none of them: found across the whole country, recognisable to ordinary people, tied to Indian legend, not confusable with another nation's bird, and able to "lend itself to formal depiction". That last phrase always sounded lifted from something real, because it was. It is Krishnan's. The internet has spent decades paraphrasing a naturalist's magazine essay without knowing whose sentence it was repeating.

Which leaves the obscenity, and its actual origin is better than the legend. In 1974 the folklorist P. Thankappan Nair published a paper called "The Peacock Cult in Asia" in Asian Folklore Studies. On page 133 he quotes Zafar Futehally recalling the row:

Some said that the Great Indian Bastard should have been given the honour because it would help in the conservation of this fine, rare bird, endemic to India.

Read it twice. That is a typographical error, printed in an academic journal, inside a sentence arguing that the bustard should have won. From there the trail is short: hedged as "Rumour has it" in 2007, stated flatly in an uncited magazine caption in 2009, into Wikipedia in February 2010 on the strength of that caption, and later given a footnote to Nair's paper, which does not say it. The misspelling everybody jokes about did happen in print. It just never decided anything.

That criterion about legend is worth one aside. The peacock's place in Indian culture is deep and genuinely old, but the earliest firmly dated mention of it is not devotional at all. In his first Major Rock Edict, Ashoka records that his kitchens have been cut back to killing "only three animals... daily, two peacocks and one deer". Two a day, and that was the reformed number.

"Which is our National Bird?"

The 1963 volume of the newsletter records the end of the argument in a tone of flat resignation: "The Peacock has been designated our National Bird. There is little point now in continuing the controversy."

Note what it confirms in passing. There was a document. A reader named Joseph George refers to "the official circular of the Government of India on the subject of our National Bird", then asks a question nobody has answered since:

Which is our National Bird? The Peafowl (Pavo cristatus) or the Peacock, which is the male of the species Pavo cristatus?

The editor added a one line footnote: "Will Government please explain?"

Sixty three years later, nobody has. The point is not pedantry. "Peacock" is the male bird. The species is the Indian peafowl, and half of it is a brown bird with no train at all. The 2011 notification, written specifically to fix a paperwork problem, says "Peacock" too.

For a bird supposedly chosen because it read instantly as India, the state was also in no hurry to use it. India got round to putting its national bird on a stamp in November 1973, a decade after giving it the title.

1. May 1960The ICBP conference in Tokyo recommends national birds, explicitly to protect species facing extinction.
2. 1961Salim Ali records that the Board has already picked the peacock, and calls it "totally misconceived and meaningless".
3. 1963An official circular designates the peacock. Readers ask whether that means the peacock or the peafowl. No reply.
4. 30 May 2011The environment ministry cannot find the original and re-notifies the tiger and the peacock.
5. 10 July 2019Asked in the Rajya Sabha, the government cites the 2011 notifications as the authority.

The line that reads like a curse

The 1963 note does not stop at resignation. It ends with a prediction.

Anyway, the peafowl will multiply and strut even more arrogantly than they do now, while the Bustard is quietly extinguished from the face of the earth.

Both halves came true.

The Wildlife Institute of India survey released in July 2026 puts the Great Indian Bustard at 130 birds, give or take 21. The trajectory behind that number is brutal: around 1,000 once, 745 by 1978, 600 in 2001, 300 in 2008. Power lines are a large part of why. WII surveyors walking 80 km of line in the Thar picked up 289 carcasses of around 30 species, and estimated that roughly 18 bustards die on wires every year, "at least 15% annually due to power lines alone". The birds have poor frontal vision and are too heavy to swerve, so they do not see the cable until they are in it.

The other half held just as well. Peafowl abundance is up by about 150 per cent nationally at a time when most Indian birds are declining, and they have spread into the Western Ghats and higher into the Himalaya. Farmers near Chulannur in Kerala have measured paddy losses of up to 40 per cent where the birds reach the crop, and because the peafowl sits in Schedule I of the Wild Life (Protection) Act it cannot legally be declared vermin, so there is almost no remedy.

It would be wrong to end there. In December 2025 the Supreme Court closed a long-running case with orders including the undergrounding of 250 km of the most dangerous lines within two years, and captive breeding has gone from six wild-collected eggs in 2019 to 94 birds by June 2026.

The law, and the hole in it

The peacock is not lightly protected. It sits in Schedule I, Part B of the Wild Life (Protection) Act, and killing one carries a minimum of three years in prison and up to seven, plus a fine of at least 25,000 rupees. Almost everything written about this online still quotes the old minimum of 10,000, which the 2022 amendment replaced in April 2023.

Then there is the exemption. Section 43 bans the commercial transfer of protected animal articles, and then says this:

Nothing in this section shall apply to tail feather of peacock and the animal article or trophies made therefrom.

Section 44 goes further and exempts feather dealers from licensing altogether. The logic is fair enough, since a peacock drops its train every year and a fallen feather costs the bird nothing. But the Act never says "naturally shed", and the only way to tell a shed feather from a plucked one is the base of the quill, which traders learned long ago to trim. In March 2021 customs at Tughlaqabad stopped a consignment bound for China holding about 21 lakh peacock feathers, 2,565 kilograms of them. A haul that size does not come off the ground.

The bird underneath the symbol

Lost in sixty years of arguing about what the peacock means is that the animal itself is stranger than the symbol. The tail, for a start, is not a tail. The train is made of upper tail coverts, and the real tail feathers are the short stiff ones hidden behind, whose job during a display is to prop the whole fan up. Those feathers reach about a metre and a half and weigh under two grams each.

Nor is a display a still image. High speed video shows a displaying peacock shaking his real tail feathers sideways against the erect train about 25 times a second. During that shaking the eyespots move barely 1.7 millimetres while the loose barbs around them swing nearly 9.6. To the peahen in front of him they hang almost perfectly still inside a shimmering blur. He is not waving a picture at her. He is holding a hundred and fifty points of stillness inside a storm.

He is not forecasting the weather either. The belief that peacocks dance before rain does not survive the calendar: the train starts growing in February and display begins then, while the rain arrives in July. Krishnan had noticed this himself, observing that peafowl breed soon after the rains, which is "probably why their display is associated popularly with the cock's alleged love of rain".

A footnote about tears

On 31 May 2017, his last working day, a Rajasthan High Court judge delivered a long judgment recommending that the cow be made India's national animal. Speaking to reporters afterwards, he explained why the peacock already held its title. The peacock, he said, is a lifelong celibate that never mates, and the peahen conceives by swallowing his tears. Asked for evidence, he said scientific evidence was not everything.

Ornithologists were patient about it. Bikram Grewal: "There is absolutely no truth in this. The peacock reproduces by copulation like every other bird." The director of the Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology called it a myth, which carries its own symmetry. The institution named after the man who lost this argument in 1961 was the one asked, in 2017, to confirm that India's national bird has sex.

It is a fitting end to the file. The bird was chosen over a species that was dying, for reasons nobody wrote down, under criteria that trace back to a magazine essay, by an order nobody can find. Salim Ali objected and lost. The bustard he wanted is down to 130 birds, and the newsletter's line about it being quietly extinguished from the face of the earth is now sixty three years old and still running.