For Jim, Phil and Harry, Cathedral Grounds Are Home On the 13 acres surrounding the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine are a Biblical garden, a fountain depicting the struggle between good and evil, and three longtime residents who spend their days wandering where they please: Jim, Phil and Harry. They are peacocks. They strut. They preen. Sometimes they fly into the trees on the grounds. "They love to lie on the bishop's flowers," said Ray Guyette, the cathedral's director of facilities management, "especially after we replant them." The dean of the cathedral, the Very Rev. James A. Kowalski - for whom Jim was named - said that for many visitors, the cathedral and its grounds are "an exotic gardenlike space that engenders mystical imaginative reaction from people." "That's the way people across cultures and time have responded to peacocks in general," he said. The visitors are fascinated. We're not a zoo where animals are caged. These birds wander the property, sometimes going off the property. They're not really captive, but everyone knows they belong to the cathedral, and we get a phone call and we go and retrieve them. Jim? Harry? Phil? On the phone, a caller would probably just say "one of your peacocks." Harry was named for a former dean, the Very Rev. Harry H. Pritchett Jr., and Phil for Phillip Foote, the business manager of the Cathedral School - behind which Jim was hiding on Tuesday afternoon. Unless that was Harry. No one among the buildings-and-grounds types who keep tabs on things at the cathedral seemed certain. Peacocks have lived on the cathedral grounds since the 1980s, when the Bronx Zoo donated some chicks. For a while, the menagerie included a peahen, but no longer. Jim and Harry were purchased and donated about 10 years ago; Jim took the place of another Jim, named for one of Reverend Kowalski's predecessors, the Very Rev. James Parks Morton. Phil, a white peacock, came later. "They don't like each other," said Barbara Hohol, the co-chairwoman of the block association on West 112th Street. They do like dog biscuits. Mr. Guyette said the cathedral buys 500 pounds of food every few months - a mixture in which the main ingredient appeared to be sunflower seeds. Mr. Guyette said their diet also included peanuts, especially in the winter, "just to bulk up." Ms. Hohol said she discovered that they were dog-biscuit connoisseurs when she was being, um, tailed as she crossed the cathedral grounds by a peacock that must have smelled what she had in her pocket, a treat for dogs in the neighborhood. She found herself treating whichever peacock had been in hot pursuit. "They're not allowed to have anything with sugar," she said, "and they probably shouldn't have the Chinese noodles. It's my fault. That led to a story about the time she had won-ton soup and brought the noodles to Jim, Phil or Harry. They also like bananas. "At least Phil does," Ms. Hohol said. The word from the cathedral was that they were prognosticators, that when they start showing their plumage, spring cannot be far behind. They are a reluctant trio. For an hour on Tuesday, they bobbed here and there. Not once did they flash their feathers. But someone saw Harry on full display last week and snapped a photo with a cellphone. A post on the Cathedral's Facebook page drew more than 150 "likes." The consensus was that groundhogs like Punxsutawney Phil, whose big day is Thursday, have nothing on the peacocks. Reverend Kowalski sounded less certain. He said he wondered if "people project their own ideas about things onto these birds." "I think people are going to be horribly depressed when we have a snowstorm of any magnitude," he said. It's not like it couldn't happen in February or March. Suddenly these predictors of spring could be inaccurate.