STRAUCH'S PHEASANT 



Phasianus colchicus strauchi Przewalski 



Names.— Subspeclfic : strauchi, after M. A. A. Strauch, the Russian Academician. English: Strauch's 

 Pheasant 



Type. — Locality: Tatung, Buhuk-gol. Describer : Przewalski. Place of Description: Mongolia, II. 

 1876, p. 119. 



SUBSPECIFIC Characters. — Usually to be distinguished from elegans and vlangalii by the purple-crreen 

 instead of dark-green margins of the chest and breast feathers. Ogilvie-Grant also considers that from elegans it is 

 further distinguished by having the middle of the scapulars whitish buff freckled with black next the shaft, and 

 from vlangalii by the margins of these feathers being Indian red. The dorsal plumage of the female is like 

 colchicus, but the nape and mantle feathers are indistinctly tipped with dark green, instead of violet and purple. 



GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION 



Southern Kansu, north to the Tatung River, East central Shensi, especially in the 

 Ta-pai-shan in the Tsin-ling Range. 



GENERAL ACCOUNT 



This form, living in the very heart of China, amid a great tumbled mass of 

 mountains, is typical of its genus in the trouble it has given to taxonomists. Only when 

 a large series was obtained by Rothschild and Hartert was proof available that the 

 characters were so variable and so individual that they were deserving of no subspecific 

 recognition. Hartert writes of this form : 



" None of the characters on which the authors relied is constant, and strauchi is 

 altogether a rather variable bird. I should not have been so confident and so sure about 

 this if we had not received from the late Alan Owston's Japanese collectors a series of 

 not less than 28 adult males — from Ta-pai-shan in the centre of the Tsin-ling Range. 

 This magnificent series, which I have been able to compare with twelve others in the 

 Tring and British Museums, shows quite clearly how strauchi varies. The crown of 

 the head is sometimes quite brownish bronzy, but mostly of a dark green. The white 

 collar on the hind neck is sometimes more than a centimetre wide, and only interrupted 

 in front, more often narrower and only indicated, and also often quite absent, without a 

 trace of it. 



" The whole upperside varies in colour, more or less, the rump chiefly according to 

 season, as the green and creamy bars of the feathers become much more conspicuous 

 after the breeding season, when the edges are worn off. The long middle rectrices are 

 sometimes much lighter, sometimes darker, more tinged with rufous brown, and the 

 width of the black bars is not constant. The underside is equally variable. The sides 

 of the breast are sometimes much lighter, more ' buffy golden-brown,' especially in the 



106 



