PHASIANUS 

 TRUE PHEASANTS 



Family PHASIANIDAE 



Subfamily PHASIANINAE 



Genus PHASIANUS 



This is the group of so-called True Pheasants, the group which includes the bird 

 known almost everywhere as the Common or English Pheasant. Some of the members 

 of this genus are among the most familiar of the birds comprised in this monograph, 

 while others we know only from a single individual, purchased in a market in some 

 isolated Turkestan village and deposited in a far-distant Russian museum. 



Their habits are much alike, although they are widely distributed, and in voice, 

 modes of life, courtship, eggs and development of plumage there is very little difference 

 between colchicus, which ranges the Caucasus along the eastern shores of the Black Sea, 

 and versicolor, the sound of whose challenge mingles with the boom of the Pacific 

 breakers, pounding on the Japanese coast, fifty-five hundred miles to the eastward. 



In order to treat the group clearly I have drawn a sharp line of demarcation between 

 Phasianus as they exist in their real zone of distribution, and the forms which have 

 been crossed indiscriminately and acclimatized in all parts of the world. 



At least thirty-five forms of these pheasants have been described, and ranked and 

 re-ranked according to the personal bias of various authors. Some give to each a 

 binomial name and full specific rank ; at the other extreme we find colchictis called a 

 species, and all the rest subspecies or geographical races of this. Until the vast 

 wilderness stretching from th-e Caucasus eastward through Turkestan, Mongolia, Central 

 China and Manchuria is zoologically better known, we can only sum up our present 

 knowledge and place our construction on the members of the group accordingly. 



In the evolution of these birds it appears that mutation has played little part, and 

 most of the forms actually grade into one another, and in their extremes are separated 

 only by slight differences of colour and pattern. This last is true even of the Formosan 

 bird, but that of Japan has departed more widely from the general type of mainland 

 pheasant. There is a good deal of individual variation, especially in the more widely 

 distributed forms, as those of Eastern China, and this necessitates the changing of the 

 species status in this genus. 



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