CABOT'S TRAGOPAN loi 



Tragopans are definitely listed : an adult male, three young males in transition plumage, 

 and fourteen females. One of the males was shot on the 30th of March, while the 

 other two were secured in the autumn. Unfortunately, no intensive study was made 

 of any of these specimens, and we are wholly in the dark as to the details of weight, 

 moult, feather wear, parasites, and the hundred and one other important facts, many 

 of which only a freshly killed bird can supply. 



My own experience with the Cabot Tragopan in China is soon told. One 

 day in mid-March I was climbing a steep hill in west central Fokien. I had had 

 good luck with other pheasants, but hitherto tragopans, for me, did not exist in 

 eastern China. The going was difficult, through dense undergrowth dripping with 

 moisture, and although it was not raining, the heavy clouds were driving past, 

 sweeping the very mountain side and shutting out all distant view. Azalea-like 

 blossoms made great splashes of cerise in the underbush. The muddy ground was 

 slippery, and an occasional bare slope almost impossible to surmount. Finally I 

 found myself on the summit of a ridge, on the farther side of which began the 

 forest, the tops of the nearest trees down the slope being on a level with my eye. 

 I rested here, panting in the saturated atmosphere and shivering in the dank, chilly 

 mist. Babblers and hill-tits whirred, wet-winged, from bush to bush, or gazed 

 curiously at me. My vision was limited by the fog to a radius of some thirty feet, 

 and for a half-hour I contented myself by noting the birds which entered this 

 area. 



I was wholly unprepared, however, for the sudden emergence of a pair of 

 tragopans — a hen in full flight, with a cock bird in close pursuit. For the space 

 of perhaps five seconds they zigzagged in and out, threading the low brush, and 

 then vanished into the forest silently as they had come. The first bird was un- 

 questionably a hen, the second was certainly not in full plumage, but as certainly 

 a cock Cabot Tragopan. My gun leaned by my side untouched, and for several 

 minutes I gazed stupidly at the place where the birds had disappeared, and then at 

 their trail ; the vision had come so unexpectedly, had passed so quickly, it seemed 

 a blur of the imagination. All further search during my brief stay proved fruitless, 

 and I had to content myself with a specimen shot and brought to me by a 

 Chinaman. It was a fully adult male, and I have elsewhere recorded the details 

 concerning it. 



The only knowledge we have of the food of these birds is that the crop of 

 an immature male contained young leaves, while in an adult female the stomach con- 

 tained acorns. The crop of my male bird was crammed with laurel-like leaves, 

 giving as strong an aromatic odour as the favourite food-leaves of the Himalayan 

 tragopans. Two small land mollusks were the only other objects in the bird's crop, 

 while the gizzard contained only a little comminuted vegetable matter. 



The elevation at which I saw these birds was certainly not more than two 

 thousand eight hundred feet, although close to mountains of considerably greater 

 height. The tragopans collected at Kuatun came doubtless from three thousand 

 five hundred to four thousand five hundred feet elevation, the birds thus living at 

 a lower altitude than any other species of the genus. 



