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It's just before sunset, and the peafowl of Victor Heights are preening along Marview Avenue, as they do almost every evening.
Long tails fanning out behind them, the birds perch atop city-issued recycling bins at one house. They leap to the roof of a one-story ranch-style home next door. They tilt their heads, shaking them slightly.
But more than anything, they appear to be taking in the stunning vista of the downtown skyline stretching out before them.
Peacocks and peahens have been unwelcome intruders for decades in many parts of Southern California. La Canada-Flintridge debated trapping them. In Palos Verdes, someone poisoned them. Ventura County rounded up nearly three dozen near the Santa Susana Pass and took them to a wildlife refuge 20 miles away
But life for the birds is different in Victor Heights.
Residents in this working-class section of L.A. west of Chinatown treat the peafowl like just another neighbor, albeit a noisy, disruptive and temperamental one. The few thousand humans who live here have grown to accept the birds' 4 a.m. squawking, their trampling of plants and flowers and their oversized eggs occasionally left on porches to hatch.
"You come to get used to them," said Clay Bush, who moved to Victor Heights in 2000.
At times, neighbors are acutely aware that the birds live in their midst. To avoid hitting them, drivers make sure to maneuver slowly on the area's steep hills. Children collect their feathers. And almost everyone seems to love watching their bizarre mating dance -- often performed in the middle of the street -- in which a male, feathers fully extended, sashays sideways toward his beloved.
Victor Heights is a collection of stuccoed apartment buildings and faded bungalows, a place with a lot of old-timers who consider themselves the birds' protectors. But none are foolish enough to call themselves the owners of these stubborn, independent-minded fowl.
Take Dennis Phipps, who has lived here for 30 years and whose house is marked by a panel decorated with the silhouettes of four peacocks, their tails extended in a blaze of...