THE CHEER PHEASANTS. 3 



suitable spots, on the other side you may search fifty square 

 miles of most likely-looking country and never see one. 



" From six to seven thousand feet is the elevation at which, 

 in October, they arc most common, but in winter and spring 

 they go lower, and some even breed lower, and in summer they 

 niay be met with up to at least ten thousand feet (I myself 

 killed a pair of old ones late in June at fully this elevation), 

 and probably higher. Of course they are birds of the outer or 

 woodiid hills,and when once you cross a high snowy ridge, which 

 effectually arrests the clouds of the monsoon, into dry, more or 

 less treeless regions, like Lahoul, Spiti, and Ladakh, you lose 

 the Cheer and all the Pheasants but the Snow-Cocks. The 

 former are all more or less birds of the forest, and all belong 

 to the zone of abundant rainfall. 



"The best places in which to find Cheer are the Dangs, or 

 precipitous places, so common in many parts of the interior • 

 not vast bare cliffs, but a whole congeries of little cliffs one 

 above the other, each perhaps from fifteen to thirty feet high 

 broken up by ledges, on which a man could barely walk, but 

 thickly set with grass and bushes, and out of which grow up 

 stunted trees, and from which hang down curious skeins of 

 grey roots and mighty garlands of creepers. 



" If the hill above be thinly wooded, and on some plateau 

 below there are a good number of Millet and Prince's Feather 

 fields, you are, in a Cheer district, next to certain in the autumn 

 to find a covey on the upper ledges of such a spot, about ten 

 o'clock in the morning. . . ." 



In describing their flight, he says :— " The force with which 

 Cheer descend is almost incredible. Other Pheasants, in de- 

 scending, keep the wings a little open ; these birds pass one at 

 such a fearful pace that it is impossible to be certain, but it 

 always appeared to me that Cheer quite closed their wings, and 

 I attribute their power to do this to their enormous tails sutificing 

 to guide them. When within a hundred feet (I speak by guess), 

 of the level at which they intend to flight, suddenly out go the 



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