NORBORO, P.E.I. - One of Prince County’s most colourful inhabitants has passed away.
Tango the peacock died in his cage sometime overnight Saturday.
He was eight years old.
He is predeceased by his cage-mates Salsa and Flamenco.
Tango was part of the Cook family, of Norboro, near Kensington.
Tango lived a simple life on his family’s property, that is, except for a brief stint of international fame in 2015.
Between July and September of that year, Tango flew the coop and escaped into the wilds of P.E.I. with only his considerable wits to sustain him.
His family’s subsequent attempts to recapture him were the talk of eastern Prince County for weeks, garnering national media attention and gaining interest from media in the United States as well.
“Everybody in Facebook world all across to the West Coast heard about him,” said Kevin Cook, Tango’s owner.
Tango originally escaped during a photo-shoot at Cook’s property, Honeytree Nursery.
When news of Tango’s escape hit P.E.I. media, Cook was inundated with sighting calls from one end of the Island to the other – and even one from New Brunswick.
Over the next several weeks, the family tried a series of progressively more technologically savvy methods to catch him.
But Tango would fall for none of it.
As if to mock his owners, the colourful avian character would periodically return home to snatch dog food from the mouths of traps meant to cage him; or simply to sit on the roof of the house and survey his would-be masters.
“He knew better. There was just no way I could catch him around the house. So he was just living, running around the property, then he’d go back to the woods at night,” said Cook.
“It was very frustrating. I thought I was being outwitted by a bird. It felt like Wylie Coyote and the Road Runner,” he said.
By the end, Cook was spending evenings hanging out in his pickup truck, sipping a coffee in one hand and in the other, holding a trip rope attached to the door of a trap. Periodically he would play peacock noises from his phone’s speakers.
It was one such evening on the Blue Shank Road, following a tip of a recent sighting, when Cook’s coyote-esque perseverance finally paid off.
He was just about to pack it in for the evening when Tango made an appearance and wandered far enough into the trap that Cook was able to trip the door shut and put the bird’s wandering days to rest.
Tango spent the next two years living on the Cooks’ farm without incident, his time in the national spotlight at an end.
Cook isn’t sure why Tango died, though he suspects it may have been an undetected illness of some sort.
It’s a shame, he said Monday, as peacocks can live for more than 15 years, so Tango still had a long life ahead of him.
In any case, Tango will be missed.
He was laid to rest Sunday morning, in a small grave beside the Cook family dog and two of their cats.
“He deserved that,” said Cook.
@JournalPMacLean
