Greenhill's Peacocks Know Where the Goldfish Crackers Fall

According to the school's associate head, Tom Perryman, a Greenhill graduate of 1981, the campus was still farmland with horses and goats in the early years. In the mid-1960s a faculty member overheard construction workers saying they needed to rehome some peacocks, and offered the campus. The birds came, and never left.

The man who takes care of them, Toby Row, feeds them every day: cat food, bird seed, peanuts and fruit. The females and the young wander freely. The males each have their own territory. Sometimes, Row told the paper, a male will leave his territory and head down to the Lower School, where the younger students may drop their Goldfish or granola bars.

Every parent who has ever packed a Goldfish cracker has known, deep down, that somewhere a bird was waiting.

The birds are not free. About five or six chicks are hatched each year and donated to farms, to avoid overpopulation and inbreeding. In the 1990s a Greenhill mother led an effort to bring in new birds and restore the flock's diversity. And there is the cleanup. "You don't want to know how much we spend on power washing, seriously," Perryman told the paper, laughing.

In spring 2026, for the school's 75th anniversary, the library held a bookmark contest. The Upper School winner, a freshman, drew a monochrome peacock. She explained what had caught her eye: "There is this one peacock where one of its feathers is just pure white."

Somebody at this school does the power washing, and somebody else sees the one white feather. A good school needs both.

We have no peacocks. We have the old dog, who performs the same function under the youngest's chair at every meal. Last week she dropped a cracker on purpose, to see what would happen. The dog ate it. She dropped another. The middle one said she was running a feeding program. My wife said we would be needing a power washer.

The youngest says the dog has a territory, and it is wherever she is sitting.