A viral video shared by an officer from India’s elite forest service, Parveen Kaswan shows hordes of peacocks and peahens taking over a road, as the lockdown in the country has left most roads empty for them to roam around freely. The video also shows several peacocks spreading their feathers and dancing on the road.
Though the exact location of where the peacocks and peahens have taken over is not known, Kaswan said, it was somewhere in Rajasthan.
“I would really like this happen for long time, animals reclaiming what was once theirs", responded one tweeple.
A service colleague of Kaswan, Ankit Kumar remarked that peacocks used to be plentiful in Delhi but now are hardly seen.
“This makes me sad and this motivates me to work hard to restore the habitat of this amazing species. The video turned out to be very thought provoking for me", said Kumar
Several such videos have appeared on social media during the lockdown, from a leopard sunbathing on a city road to elephants and even reptiles roaming on roads around their habitats free of any human intervention.
The prolonged lockdown has also improved the quality of air in cities and also water in otherwise polluted rivers like the Ganges.
The lockdown now has been extended until 31 May, but there is no sign of COVID-19 abating. According to the current trend, India will cross the one lakh mark by Tuesday (19 May) as the caseload increases by several thousand every day. On Monday, it was 96,169 including 36,824 cured cases and 3,029 deaths, per data released by the federal Health Ministry.