2198 THE GAME BIRDS AND RAILS 



naked skin of the sides of the head, throat, and fore part of the neck dark blue, the 

 feathers on the crown and the short crest black, the upper parts beautifully 

 chequered, mottled, or spotted with black and buff, the chest rufous barred with 

 black, and the rest of the under parts black with wavy bars of chestnut and buff. 

 The primary feathers are ornamented on the outer webs with closely-approximated 

 rows of black and rufous spots, while on the basal part of the inner web there is a 

 rufous band minutely dotted with white and margined by a yellow black-barred 

 line. The outer webs of the enormous secondary quills are adorned with a series of 

 large eye-like spots, partly white, yellow, and rufous, and surrounded by a black 

 ring. In total length the bird measures six feet from the bill to the end of the tail. 

 The female has the general coloration of the male, but lacks the beautiful ornamen- 

 tal marking, as well as the enormously -developed secondaries and middle tail 

 feathers. Davison writes that these pheasants are quite solitary, every male hav- 

 ing "his own ' drawing-room,' of which he is excessively proud, and which he keeps 

 scrupulously clean. They haunt exclusively the depths of the evergreen forests, and 

 each male chooses some open level spot sometimes down in a dark, gloomy ravine, 

 entirely surrounded and shut in by dense cane brakes and rank vegetation some- 

 times on the top of a hill where the jungle is comparatively open from which he 

 clears all the dead leaves and weeds for a space of six or eight yards square until 

 nothing but the bare clean earth remains, and thereafter he keeps this place scrupu- 

 lously clean, removing carefully every dead leaf or twig that may happen to fall on 

 it from the trees above. These cleared spaces are undoubtedly used as dancing 

 grounds, but personally I have never seen a bird dancing in them, but have always 

 found the proprietor either seated quietly in, or moving backward and forward 

 slowly about them, calling at short intervals, except in the morning and evening, 

 when they roam about to feed and drink. The males are always to be found at 

 home, and roost on some tree close by. ' ' 



Another allied pheasant is Reinhard's argus (Reinhardius ocellatus), 

 A " from the mountains in the interior of Tonkin, in which the secondary 

 quills are not longer than the primaries, though in the male the mid- 

 dle pair of tail feathers are enormously lengthened, wide at the base, and tapering 

 to the extremity. The male measures about seven feet from the bill to the end of 

 the tail. 



The gorgeously-colored peafowl differ from all the birds already 

 Peafowl .. , . , . . 



noticed in having the upper tail coverts developed into a long train far 



exceeding the tail in length. The common species (Pavo cristatus}, of India, As- 

 sam, and Ceylon is too familiar to require description, but in the Indo-Chinese 

 countries, ranging in the north from Chittagong, westward through Siam to Cochin- 

 China, and south through the Malay Peninsula to Java and possibly Sumatra, there 

 'occurs the Burmese peafowl (P. muticus}, the male of which is distinguished by 

 having the crest feathers more elongate and equally webbed on each side of the 

 shafts, while the wing coverts and scapulars are black. Widely, though locally, dis- 

 tributed over the whole of India, the common species prefers broken and jungly 

 ground in the neighborhood of water and cultivation, but does not, as a rule, range 

 to an elevation of more than four thousand feet, though it has been obtained as high 



