PHEASANTS. 



431 



In total length the bird measures 6 feet from the bill to the end of the tail. 



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



ornamental marking, as well as the enormously developed secondaries and middle 



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



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



he keeps scrupulously clean. They haunt exclusively the depths of the ever-green 



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 — sometimes 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 scrupulously 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 backwards and forwards 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." 



Reiniiaxd's Another allied pheasant is Reinhard's argus {Reinhardius 



Argus. ocellatus), from the mountains in the interior of Tonkin, in which 



the secondary quills are not longer than the primaries, though in the male the 



middle pair of tail-feathers are enormously lengthened, wide at the base, and 



tapering to the extremity. The male measures about 7 feet, from the bill to the 



end of the tail. 



The g-orgreously coloured pea-fowl diifer from all the birds 

 Pea-Fowl, r> o >/ r 



already 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, Assam, and Ceylon is too familiar to require description, but in the 

 Indo-Chinese countries, ranging in the north from Chittagong, westwards through 

 Siam to Cochin-China, and south through the Malay Peninsula to Java and 

 possibly Sumatra, there occurs the Burmese pea-fowl (P. niuticus), 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, distributed over the whole of India, the common species 

 prefers broken and jungly ground in the neighbourhood 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 as six thousand. In India the Hindus regard 

 the pea-fowl with a superstitious reverence, and object to their being shot ; and in 

 native Hindu States, the prohibition being absolute, they are unmolested either by 

 Europeans or natives. A variety of the pea-fowl has the whole of the wing- 

 coverts, scapulars, and secondaries brownish black, glossed with purple and edged 

 with green, and the thighs black instead of buff. It closely resembles hybrids 

 between the two species already mentioned, but arises independently in flocks of 

 the common pea-fowl which have been pure bred for years. Possibly it may be 

 a case of reversion to the ancestral type, being unknown in a wild state. 



