92 ADVENTURES AMONG BIRDS 



The most brilliant plumage seen in the tropics would 

 not appear excessive then, when the thin dry leaves on 

 the trees, rendered translucent by the sunbeams, shine 

 like coloured glass, and when the bird is seen in some 

 glade or opening on a woodland floor strewn with 

 yellow gold and burnished red, copper and brightest 

 russet leaves. He is one with it all, a part of that 

 splendour, and a beautifully decorative figure as he 

 moves slowly with deliberate jetting gait, or stands at 

 attention, the eared head and shining neck raised and 

 one foot lifted. Many a writer has tried to paint him 

 in words; perhaps Ruskin alone succeeds, in a passage 

 which was intended to be descriptive of the colouring 

 of the pheasants generally. "Their plumage," he said, 

 "is for the most part warm brown, delicately and even 

 beautifully spotty; and in the goodliest species the spots 

 become variegated, or inlaid as in a Byzantine pavement, 

 deepening into imperial purple and azure, and lighting 

 into lustre of innumerable eyes." 



But alas! not infrequently when I have seen the 

 pheasant in that way in the coloured woods in October, 

 when after the annual moult his own colouring is richest 

 and he is seen at his best, my delight has vanished 

 when I have lifted my eyes to look through the thinned 

 foliage at the distant prospect of earth and the blue 

 overarching sky. For who that has ever looked at nature 

 in other regions, where this perpetual hideous war of 

 extermination against all noble feathered life is not car- 

 ried on, does not miss the great soaring bird in the 

 scene — eagle, or vulture, or buzzard, or kite, or harrier 



