52 A MONOGRAPH OF THE PHEASANTS 



chtickl It was beyond human endurance to lie perfectly motionless for more than 

 ten minutes under such scrutiny, and some involuntary movement on my part sent 

 the birds back with a rush to shelter. As they showed no signs of emerging again 

 I sat up and slid down towards them. It was as if I had fired some hidden mine. 

 In a twinkling the air was alive with feathered bombs, and Hume's experience came 

 vividly to mind when a wounded Cheer struck him full in the face and almost 

 knocked him down a precipice. With wide-flaring, streaming tails, the birds whirred 

 past me ; several from my very feet shooting out and downward like rockets, others, 

 which, all unknown to me, must have been crouched only a few feet uphill from 

 where I had been lying, sprang into the air and veered past me on either side. I had, 

 in fact, all unwittingly blundered into the very heart of a good-sized covey, and 

 stopping when I did I had only sent them into hiding. So instantaneous was the 

 outburst that it was not until the last bird had vanished that I realized and 

 appreciated what a wonderful sight had been vouchsafed me : a half-score of great 

 birds suddenly springing, like Jason's dragon warriors, from the very earth and 

 hurling themselves with utter recklessness into the vast space of the great valley. 

 How any strength of quill could ever regain the apparent lost balance and break the 

 force of that bullet-like abandon to gravity was inexplicable. I looked about me with 

 added interest and marked the spot for future visits. 



As I made my way obliquely downward, the rays of the low sun fired the red 

 boulders, turning them to blazing copper in contrast to the black-green forests 

 below. Not a note came from the distant scattered covey, although I listened long 

 and carefully. The bare upper heights were silent, deserted. Only from the deodars 

 came a vesper duet ; now and then the sweet, sibilant tones of a whistling thrush, 

 clear-cut and thrilling, to the low, muffled, running accompaniment of the cooing of 

 doves preparing for the night, somewhere in the heart of the great Himalayan forest. 



GENERAL DISTRIBUTION 



The range of the Cheer Pheasant is a very limited one. It is usually given as the 

 North-western Himalayas, but this is true only in a restricted sense. I know of no 

 record far in Kashmir to the north-west, while from here eastward it is quite abundant 

 in Chamba, Kumaon, Garhwal, and a number of the lesser Hill States. In Nepal it 

 extends farther eastward than Hume thought, and there are records as far as the Gandals 

 River. Even this, however, gives it one of the narrowest areas of pheasant distribution, 

 and when we remember that within this circumscribed habitat the birds are found only 

 between four and ten thousand feet elevation, we realize to how sharply demarcated a 

 zone of the earth's surface a single isolated species of large, non-migrating bird may be 

 confined. This, too, not upon an island, but in the heart of a great mountainous region 

 most of which would seem to offer suitable haunts for the pheasant. Cheer show a 

 seasonal migration downward from January to March, being forced from the bare heights 

 in winter by the snow. 



GENERAL ACCOUNT 



I had the Cheer Pheasant under observation for only a very few weeks, and hence 

 can speak of it at first hand during but a limited portion of its annual life. Hume 



