Are peafowl and peacocks the same thing?

A male peafowl is a peacock; a female peafowl is called a peahen. I believe that we hear mostly about peacocks and generalize the term to mean all peafowl, a term we, by comparison, rarely hear. Also it is written as one Word, which we then think peacock is the species name.

There are other instances when we often use the gender term of of a species with the name of the species. For instance, many people call all cattle, cows, when actually cow is the female cattle and bull is the male cattle. The terms cow and bull are used in numerous mammalian species to designate gender, not species, just as cock and hen are used in a number of species of birds.