Wayne Newton’s peacock peril

If you live near Casa de Shenandoah, look out: The neighborhood is being terrorized by roaming peacocks who make their base of operations at the mansion/museum of Mr. Las. Vegas himself, Wayne Newton. The latter’s people are trying to have it both ways, saying that the peafowl were present when Newton originally bought the estate but also remarking, “These are feral peacocks. This is a neighborhood problem, not a Newton problem, in fairness.” (Newton lawyer Jay Brown also offered this non-denial denial: “We never bought a peacock. We never brought in a peacock.”) But how is the neighborhood to solve the problem when the birds are making the Newton ranch their base of operations?

The situation at the Newton estate has become such a flashpoint that it occupied 30 minutes of a Clark County Commission meeting, but no solution was reached. Trapping was ruled out as ineffectual. The Nevada Department of Wildlife shrugged off the problem, saying it was a neighborhood issue. Clipping the birds’ wings would make them coyote bait. They could, in theory, be sterilized but the nearest expert lives in Wisconsin. Homeowner Bart Donovan speaks for a number of neighbors when he says, “These things were born on the Newton property, they live there, they roost there at night. As far as I’m concerned, they’re their birds.”

April Juelke got a greeting committee of peacocks on her first morning in her new house. “We heard something on the roof that scared us to death. We thought it was a burglar breaking in but it was a bunch of peacocks.” That was only the beginning of the family’s travails, according to the Las Vegas Review-Journal, “the free-roaming peafowl fly over the ranch’s walls every morning and evening to squawk, scratch the family’s cars with their talons and leave droppings that have given their Labrador retriever … Intestinal diseases twice.” It just seems to be in Newton’s karma to leave trouble in his wake wherever he goes.

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