CHEER PHEASANT 6i 



Wilson has well described the morning and evening call of the Cheer, although 

 when the notes are uttered hastily and run together they strike the ear as a sort of 

 curious tremulous or querulous squeal, very penetrating and characteristic. It is 

 from the sound of the separate notes, which are often given in slow succession 

 or even singly, that the native name of the bird is derived, the hill-tribes calling it 

 Cher, pronounced to rhyme with the French m^re. The wild, frantic vocal outburst 

 which is heard when the birds are suddenly flushed cannot better be described than 

 a series of screeching chuckles. Observing the birds, as I did many times, while they 

 were wholly undisturbed, I was able to hear something of their more conversational 

 utterances. The content note of the hen, and occasionally of the male as well, is a low, 

 sleepy waaaaaaak, waak, waak, exactly like the similar utterance of a domestic fowl 

 when she is searching idly for food. When a pair of Cheer were digging side by side 

 they mumbled inarticulately to themselves now and then, while a sharp hik I uttered 

 almost involuntarily, would bring the other bird at once to full attention. If suspicion 

 of danger then increased, the cock might leap up to the nearest mound of turf and utter 

 the tuk I tuk ! tuk I twenty or thirty times, his whole body twitching at each note 

 with the effort of utterance. When approached in captivity the Cheer, if at all 

 pugnacious, will often give voice to a murmuring through almost closed beak, 

 much like the characteristic note of the silver pheasants. Once when a bird dashed 

 past me, sending forth the flood of agonized chuckles, it dipped just over a ridge below 

 me, and almost at once gave vent to a series of plaintive cries, as if it might have been 

 captured and held by some enemy. I hastened after it, but the outcry ceased, and 

 I could find no trace of pheasant, enemy or tragedy, and cannot conceive what caused 

 the sudden change in notes. 



First-hand accounts of the habits of the Cheer are too rare to omit any of the notes 

 on the nesting. Wilson says that *' the female makes her nest in the grass or amongst 

 low bushes and lays from nine to fourteen eggs of a dull white, and rather small for so 

 large a bird. They are hatched about the end of May or beginning of June. Both 

 male and female keep with the young brood and seem very solicitous for their welfare." 



I had erected my umbrella tent for two days on a bit of rocky shelf half-way down 

 a steep slope in central Garhwal, and had spent many cramped hours watching a cock 

 Cheer doing little or nothing, but remaining persistently near a patch of young deodars. 

 One afternoon as my eye was glued to one of the loop-hole slits, running idly over the 

 expanse of coarse grass and fern, a hen Cheer suddenly appeared from nowhere, standing 

 and looking about her. Soon she took a step forward, and then turned and walked 

 back beneath the low, drooping branches of the conifer, and shortly reappeared on the 

 other side of the clump of small trees. As both birds then vanished I returned to camp 

 after another hour of vain watching. The next morning neither cock nor hen Cheer 

 was visible, and ensconced within the tent I began searching for signs of them. As my 

 eye rested for a moment on the spot where the hen had appeared, I suddenly detected 

 her through the grass stems squatted close to the ground. I thought she was still 

 alarmed at my entrance into the tent, but as an hour passed and she did not move, 

 while the cock marched past several times, feeding as he went, my suspicions began to 

 be aroused, and I suspected that she was actually sitting upon eggs. About three in 

 the afternoon she rose as before, stood motionless a minute and repeated her exit to the 



