The many eyes of the peacock's train have their own Greek story: they are the hundred eyes of the giant Argus Panoptes, the all-seeing watchman, which Hera transferred to the bird's tail after Argus was slain, as Ovid tells it. In India the peacock is the vahana of Kartikeya, the war-god, and a peacock feather adorns the crown of Krishna, so that the bird carries both martial and tender associations; it is also linked with Saraswati and, as a killer of snakes, with the destruction of poison and evil. The peacock's sheer visual extravagance made it, almost everywhere it occurs, a sign of royalty, pride and the sun, the fanned train read as a radiant disc.
India formally recognised the bird's ancient prestige in 1963 by naming the Indian peafowl the national bird, and it has been a protected species under India's Wildlife (Protection) Act of 1972 ever since, making it illegal to hunt, capture or trade the birds; the legal protection sits on top of millennia of religious and royal reverence for a species that, unusually among the world's iconic birds, has never been especially rare or endangered in its native range. A point of species accuracy: peacock properly names only the male bird, the female is a peahen and the species peafowl, and the vivid train belongs to the Indian peafowl described above; two further, distinct peafowl species exist, the green peafowl of Southeast Asia and the Congo peafowl of central Africa, both far less familiar in the Greek and Indian traditions recorded here.