Debbie Bozinoff in the barn with one of her peacocks. Debbie Bozinoff has always had a houseful, a barn full of animals; until late last summer, she was the proud owner of a charming wild boar, named George. She has donkeys, a miniature horse, two goats and a couple of pot bellied pigs.

She is always willing to offer a home to guinea pigs and bunnies and has several of these living at liberty in her barn. Of course, there are also dogs and cats.

She likes birds, too, and has housed chickens, ducks and geese, and, now, peacocks.

She likes to tell the story: "It all began on a beautiful summer day about 10 years ago, when I went to visit friends and there he was in all his splendour — a fabulous male peacock! I was blown away and I just had to have him and his two female companions, the peahens."

So, she bought the three birds from her friends and took them home to her farm in Mono.

They were a wonderful asset to Debbie's home. The magnificent male strutted about the property, fanning his tail and calling out to the world that he was there with that special "cur-ouw!" (well, let's see you spell a peacock's call) that is so distinctive. It echoed across the neighbourhood, through the woods and across the fields.

Much to Debbie's delight, the hens laid eggs and sat on them. Said Debbie: "When they started to lay on their eggs and hatch their chicks, I thought it was just wonderful. This kept happening until, after some years, I had 50 of them."

Although peacocks only have one brood per season, they were free to come and go as they pleased during the nice weather and, over several years, of course, their numbers grew.

At one point, though, there was a problem with racoons breaking into the peacocks' enclosure and so, Debbie began to look for other ways to safeguard the eggs while they were developing.

Her first option was an incubator, in which she kept the eggs she took from the peahens, watching over them with as much diligence as their mothers, turning them and listening for the "peeps" of the emerging chicks. The project was fraught with difficulties.

As Debbie explained it: "With the peacock chicks, the humidity has to be perfect. And the timing of their hatching needs to be done just right — you can't start until they're ready — you have to hear them peeping. Then, if you're helping them get out it has to be done so slowly — otherwise they bleed to death."

Indeed, I remembered one day, popping in to Debbie's for tea. She was sitting in a chair, with an egg in her hands, holding it tenderly and trying to guess when she should help the tiny chick inside remove the next chip of egg shell. She was clearly quite in love with the baby and deeply worried about her own skills as a mother peacock.

"Eventually," she continued, "I had to stop because it was so stressful, getting up at all hours of the night to catch them at exactly at the right moment."

She had chickens in a secure coop and thought it might work out well if the chickens hatched the pea-chicks. And she was right. The chickens were as good at mothering pea-chicks as they were their own chicks.

Debbie took the chickens' eggs away from the hens, replacing them with the peacock eggs. The chickens did a great job of hatching the pea-chicks but it was up to Debbie to get their feed right.

Rather than using commercial medical feed ("I don't believe in that stuff," as she said), Debbie hard boiled the chicken eggs and mixed them with parsley and other greens: spinach, romaine lettuce, as well as "the tiniest bits of cracked corn", blended them together as very finely chopped bits and fed the mix to the pea-chicks, who thrived.

Once they were a couple of months old, old enough to run or even fly away from predators, they were able to join the other peacocks in their enclosure.

Now, Debbie admits that if she had not interfered with the natural process of only some peacocks surviving attacks by the racoons while others were taken, she would not have had so many peacocks.

Eventually, she found homes for many, and sold the magnificent tail feathers of the male birds at charity functions and so forth.

She moved the peacocks into the barn for the winter, where, come the spring, they began to lay their eggs again. In order to keep the population down, Debbie began to take the eggs away and feed them to her other animals. However, nature will have her way and, once the pea-hens got fed up with Debbie's system of birth control, they began to lay their eggs in the woodland on the property.

When a pea-hen disappeared; Debbie would think she had wandered off or been eaten until one day, back the pea-hen would come, leading a string of chicks behind her. Of course, Debbie made them welcome and so, the peacock empire has stayed strong.

Over the years, the peacocks have taken to visiting the neighbours.

Debbie said, "I used to get into a fluster every time they were gone but now I know that they'll come back. They just go to the neighbours' bird feeders."

And she told me the story: "One of my hens wandered off and I thought an animal had got her. But on Christmas Day she came back, so cold and hungry. I brought her into the barn and took care of her — now you can't tell her from the others!"

Philosophically, she commented, "I don't have a problem losing one to a fox or coyote once in a while — that's just Nature's way."