loo A MONOGRAPH OF THE PHEASANTS 



During the succeeding thirty-five years the few meagre facts recorded of this 

 tragopan almost without exception have been drawn from the immediate neighbourhood 

 of David's observations. By far the most important insight into the life history of 

 the bird is the finding of four eggs, deposited and being incubated in an old nest of 

 a squirrel, thirty feet from the ground. This nest was found by a native Chinese 

 hunter near Kuatun, a small village in the extreme north-western part of Fokien. 

 The facts of this discovery, as related by La Touche, are as follows : '' Only four 

 specimens were obtained by us during our stay at Kuatun ; an adult male which 

 had been trapped in March ; a young male assuming adult plumage, trapped on the 

 30th of March ; and two females, shot by our hunters in the forests on the 13th of 

 April and the 17th of May. The latter bird was sitting on her nest when shot. 

 The hunter who secured her, happening to look up into a large tree, saw a bird looking 

 down at him, and, taking it for a Barbet (!), fired a charge of dust-shot, which, to his 

 astonishment, brought down a fine hen Tragopan. He at once climbed the tree 

 and found, on an old squirrel's nest of the year before, four eggs. According to 

 the man's statement, the nest was about thirty feet from the ground. These are 

 the first eggs of caboti obtained at Kuatun. The natives, having never taken the 

 nest before, were much astonished at finding it so high up in a tree, as until then 

 they had met with Pheasants' nests only on the ground. 



" Of the four eggs brought to me, two were nearly ready to hatch, and two 

 were addled, one of the latter being quite rotten. The remains of the young birds 

 extracted from the fertile eggs have been deposited in the British Museum. The 

 wings of the young birds have quills over an inch long. One of the eggs, now 

 in Mr. Rickett's collection, measures 49 x 41 mm. The other three measure 61 x 41, 

 49 X 39, and 48 x 41 mm. The colour of these eggs is buff, thickly freckled with 

 pale brown, the freckling coalescing in places. The texture is chalky. The shape 

 is a short, broad, ovate in two eggs, and ovate in a third." 



The fact that four eggs were found in this tree nest would seem to be an 

 exception to the more general rule of two which I have demonstrated elsewhere, 

 but the condition of these four eggs supports, rather than negatives, this assumption. 

 It would seem probable that two of the eggs were laid, and although fertile (as 

 evidenced by their addled condition) did not for some reason develop. The other 

 two were apparently a second clutch which had been incubated until nearly hatched. 

 In any event, even if all four eggs had been deposited at one time, there would seem 

 to be some physiological difference dividing them into the two groups of two each. 

 This recalls at once the condition of the ovary in the incubating Temminck's tragopan 

 which I have mentioned. 



But, aside from this point of view, I wish to re-emphasize this intensely interesting 

 additional proof that the tragopans are breaking away from all normal phasianine 

 standards of nidification, and paralleling the curassows and guans of South America. 

 There seems little doubt but that the nest-building instinct is being acquired, and 

 the first stage in the process is the adoption of the ready-made nests of other birds 

 and of arboreal mammals, with the addition, as I have shown, of a slight lining of 

 leaves and twigs. 



In the several collections of birds made at Kuatun eighteen specimens of the Cabot 



