ARGUS PHEASANT 169 



lowered in front, with all quills fully expanded and the first quills 

 touching in front. Now can be seen the characteristic and 

 celebrated ornaments of the male about which so much has been 

 written by theorists on sexual selection : the wonderful rows of 

 eye-spots along the outer webs of the great secondaries, plainly 

 tinted but exquisitely shaded to resemble balls in cups, which 

 everyone must have noticed in these quills when worn in ladies' 

 hats, and the delicate colouring of the pinion-quills with their 

 dark blue shafts, leopard spots, and white-peppered chestnut 

 bands along the inner sides of the shafts. All these artistic 

 excellencies are supposed to please the female, but there is as yet 

 no evidence that she is impressed by them. Her mate is rather 

 handicapped in his manoeuvres to give her a good front view by 

 having to keep his head behind the huge screen formed by his 

 wings, which, with the exception of the ends of the long feathers 

 of the raised tail, are all that can be seen from the front ; but now 

 and then he pokes his head through from behind the scenes, so 

 it is said. In any case what he presents to the hen is a fan, not a 

 bird, and even in repose, as I have said before, he is not elegant, 

 his decoration being so exaggerated — in fact, he bears the same 

 relation to the peacock that a lady in the silly crinolines once 

 worn does to one gracefully wearing a becoming if lengthy train. 

 The male argus is a typical crusty old bachelor in his way of 

 living. He selects a small open spot in the forest, and clears oflf 

 all the dead leaves and twigs and removes all weeds. He is so 

 fussy about keeping this masculine boudoir clean that several 

 of the poaching methods of capturing him depend on this fad of 

 his, the dead-fall or what not being released by his pulling at a 

 peg stuck in his floor, which he immediately tries to remove on 

 commghome. The clearing is no doubt used for a display-place, 

 and it certainly is the male bird's home, for he roosts near it, 

 and is generally to be found in it, when not out searching for 

 food, which consists of insects, slugs, and fallen berries, a 

 fruit very like a prune being an especial favourite. Although 

 these birds do not seem to wander about and fight, they 

 challenge, or at any rate call, quite freely ; the note is 

 expressed by the Malay name, but is a two-syllabled one 

 — it always sounded to me like " who-whoop " ! The hens 



