Peek

peek
verb, intransitive. To look quickly, typically in a furtive manner; to protrude slightly so as to be just visible.
Also a noun.

The new neighbors’ flock of guineas didn’t take long to discover that Hillary’s yard was a good source of ticks and other nutritious bugs. They wandered across the dirt road every mid-morning and spent at least half an hour there, foraging. Hillary chuckled when she recalled Rick’s visit the second or third time his birds had invaded her yard.

“I hope they’re not bothering you?” he had ventured uneasily.

“Of course not,” she had told him. “I appreciate the service!”

She knew that he was asking because a flock of guineas could make a lot of racket, if they felt threatened. Since the only threat on her property in daylight might be her pair of yard cats, she doubted that she would have cause to complain to him ... as if he would ever be able to control the barely-domesticated birds.

Just then, Hillary heard them: a loud, chorus of “Buckwheat, buckwheat, buckwheat!”

She rose from her desk and looked out the kitchen window. The guinea flock had formed a tight cluster a few feet from the edge of the porch. It looked like a circle of feather-clad soccer-sized balls, with heads on tapering necks thrusting outward from it randomly. All the birds seemed to be looking at a large flower pot at the edge of the porch. When Hillary saw that one of her cats was peeking at the guineas from behind it, she burst out laughing. Her fear that her cats would attack Rick’s guineas disappeared. The birds knew how to handle small feline predators.

Definitions adapted from The New Oxford American Dictionary, Oxford University Press, Inc., 2005 (eBook Edition, copyright 2008), and from Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, G. & C. Merriam Company, Publishers, Springfield, Massachusetts, USA, 1965, depending on which is more convenient to hand.