Editing Flannery O'Connor (section)

===Interest in birds===
O'Connor frequently used bird imagery within her fiction.

O'Connor kept [[Chicken|chickens]] and [[Domestic canary|canaries]] at her childhood home in Savannah.<ref>{{Cite web |last=Wiering |first=Maria |title=Flannery O'Connor's 100th birthday parties celebrate author's quirks, talents — and love of birds |url=https://www.ncronline.org/culture/flannery-oconnors-100th-birthday-parties-celebrate-authors-quirks-talents-and-love-birds |access-date=2025-03-29 |website=National Catholic Reporter |language=en}}</ref> When she was six, O'Connor experienced her first brush with celebrity status. [[Pathé News]] filmed "Little Mary O'Connor" with O'Connor and her trained [[chicken]]<ref>{{cite AV media |people=O'Connor, Flannery |date=1932 |title=Do You Reverse? |medium=Motion picture |publisher=Pathé |url=http://www.britishpathe.com/video/do-you-reverse-1/}}</ref> and showed the film around the country. She said: "When I was six I had a chicken that walked backward and was in the Pathé News. I was in it too with the chicken. I was just there to assist the chicken but it was the high point in my life. Everything since has been an anticlimax."{{sfn|O'Connor|Magee|1987|p=38}} According to writer and critic Catherine Taylor, the "determined chicken, walking backwards to go forward, is a tempting metaphor for O'Connor's own endurance. It instilled in her a 'love affair' with birds that seemed to transcend most human interactions".<ref>{{Cite news |title=Flannery O'Connor at 100: should we still read her? |last=Taylor |first=Catherine |work=The Guardian |url= https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/25/so-much-more-than-southern-gothic-flannery-oconnor-at-100 |date=25 March 2025 |access-date=28 March 2025}}</ref>

In high school, when the girls were required to sew Sunday dresses for themselves, O'Connor sewed a full outfit of underwear and clothes to fit her pet duck and brought the duck to school to model it.<ref>{{cite book|author=Basselin, Timothy J. |date=2013 |title=Flannery O'Connor: Writing a Theology of Disabled Humanity|publisher=baylorpress.com |page=9}}</ref>

As an adult at Andalusia, she raised and nurtured some 100 [[peafowl]]. Fascinated by birds of all kinds, she raised ducks, ostriches, emus, toucans, and any sort of exotic bird she could obtain, while incorporating peacock imagery in her writing. She described her peacocks in an essay titled "The King of the Birds". O'Connor often used peacocks as symbolism in her writing. The birds are thought to represent divine beauty and mystery, connecting to her spirituality and belief in living reminders of the unexpected, mysterious ways grace appears in the world.