Friends and neighbors gathered this month to celebrate the 3rd birthday of a curious peacock who has become a neighborhood celebrity.
Anabella Godoy spends most days in bed looking out the window. She suffers from multiple sclerosis, otherwise known as MS, which limits her mobility. One day, Godoy noticed an unexpected visitor perched on the chair outside her window – a peacock.
Godoy was used to seeing peacocks at her South Grove home, but had never seen one so close and friendly. The peacock kept returning to her window, brightening her day with magnificent green feathers and his company.
“He is fantastic,” she said. “He gives me company all the time.”
The peacock’s name is Magic, and unlike other Grove peacocks, Magic was rescued and raised by one of Godoy’s neighbors on Loquat Avenue.
Catarina Jimenez was given Magic by a neighbor just a few days after he was hatched. His mother was nowhere in sight.
It was her first time ever holding a bird.
An adventurer and world traveler born in Costa Rica, Jimenez was always on the go, exploring new places, cultures, and lifestyles. She was hardly ever at home and knew none of her neighbors. She expected to take care of the young peacock for a couple months until he ventured off on his own.
Now, three years later, Jimenez just celebrated Magic’s third birthday with a community potluck. She invited the entire neighborhood to celebrate the orphan peacock she rescued in 2021.
“It’s been an incredible experience,” she said. “A lot of us have met because of Magic. He’s brought us all together in some weird way.”
When Jimenez began raising Magic, she had no idea how to nurture a bird, let alone a peacock. Instead of confining him to a cage, she let Magic roam free after a few months, using her backyard as a home base and feeding station.
“Little by little I got into just following my instinct,” Jimenez said. “When I met the experts that told me that I should not do this, and I should not do that, I’m thinking, that’s right. I did everything that I wasn’t supposed to do. And this thing happened.”
Magic’s took advantage of his freedom, wandering into yards to meet his neighbors. Jimenez soon followed, enlisting her neighbors, now friends, to help her locate Magic when he strayed too far from home.
Other neighbors would stop and stare when Jimenez and Magic walked together, baffled at the pairing. That’s when Jimenez would explain their story.
Over the past three years, Jimenez has documented her life with Magic, posting for their Instagram fan club of nearly 500 followers.
She started a neighborhood group of people she met through Magic, which is now used for all types of community discussion.
And, when Magic went missing for several weeks in March, she received endless calls from neighbors seeking to help. Jimenez is now raising money to buy a GPS tag through a GoFundMe page (https://www.gofundme.com/f/MagicTagforFreedom) that includes a video portrait of her life with Magic.
“You hear stories about what the Grove was like in the ‘60s and the ‘70s and even the early ‘80s. There was this community and everybody knew each other. And I would say only when Magic joined the neighborhood did it really become that,” neighbor Chenell Tannure said.
Tannure met Magic when he was six months old, and she and her children quickly became some of his favorite neighbors.
“I always say Magic has brought magic back into Coconut Grove, at least for us.”
His time in the neighborhood has been transformative for her kids, she said.
“It’s really taught them to care for animals, but also to have respect for them and give them their space. Magic is very friendly and obviously very loving, but he has his boundaries.”
Because of the way he was raised, Magic is both wild and domesticated, making him the perfect ambassador for other peacocks in the neighborhood that are less well liked, Jimenez said.
Jimenez hopes that sharing Magic’s warmth with others will earn the many wild peacocks that populate Coconut Grove a little more respect.
Now seven months pregnant and preparing to welcome twins into the world, she’s grateful for what Magic has taught her about nurturing. “I constantly remind him how he’s the most beautiful peacock in the whole world and how he’s the most loved and how there’s no one more special than him,” she said. “He’s magic.”
