ELLIOT'S BARRED-BACKED PHEASANT 



Syrmaticus ellioti (Swinhoe) 



Names.— Specific : ellioti, for Dr. D. G. Elliot, the eminent American zoologist. English : Elliot's or Chinese 

 Barred-backed Pheasant. French : Faisan d'Elliot. Native: Han-ky (Fowl of the Dry Places, Chinese). 



Brief Description.— Male : Crown brownish; hind neck bluish grey; throat and lower neck black; 

 side neck, two wing-bars and belly white ; mantle, shoulders, wings and breast fiery bronze-red, with a small 

 sub-terminal black spot ; wing-band across lesser coverts steel blue. Lower back and rump black, glossed with 

 blue, barred and tipped with white ; tail broadly barred with pale grey and chestnut. Female : general colour 

 various shades of brown, barred and mottled above and spotted on the breast with black ; chin, throat and belly 

 mostly white ; flanks and under tail-coverts tipped with white. Mantle boldly marked with black, setting off the 

 conspicuous white shaft-streaks; lower throat and fore neck sometimes black; lateral tail-feathers chestnut, 

 tipped with black and white bands. 



Range. — Mountains of south-eastern China. 



THE BIRD IN ITS HAUNTS 



I FOUND Elliot's Pheasant in several localities in Eastern China, all more or less 

 similar in character, and all wholly unlike the haunts of pheasants in other countries. 

 Mountains wild and rugged in contour ; the rocky heights of deep river gorges looming 

 dark and mysterious through the morning mist. Seen thus they might well seem to 

 mark some untrodden land or new-discovered continent. But the glamour of the 

 sunshine dispels all this imagery, and we find ourselves face to face with a country 

 which during past centuries has seen its hundreds of millions of human inhabitants 

 come and go. A few miles away is a city teeming with a million and a half of Chinamen, 

 with no railroads and not a single wheeled vehicle. Yet they have over-run this whole 

 region, have combed the surface of mountain and valley for untold generations. 



Every level spot around us shows the bright emerald of sprouting rice ; every trail 

 winding over the wildest, most isolated slopes, leads at last to a grave, either a flimsy 

 hut of thatch sheltering a rough-hewn coffin of unpainted wood, or an elaborately carved 

 horseshoe of great granite blocks. These old graves are picturesque and wholly in 

 keeping with their wilderness setting. The rocks or cement of which they are made 

 soon become weathered and lichened, and except for the conventional repetition of their 

 designs there is little to distinguish them from the surrounding out-cropping boulders. 



Two, four, even seven hundred years these graves have watched the seasons come 

 and go, and after all this time, the worshipping descendants from time to time climb 

 laboriously to the lofty sites and offer their little rice-paper prayer flags, weighting them 

 down with stones along the tops of the walls. Here, when we scrape aside moss and 

 lichen, we can make out the carven phoenix with wildly waving tail, and here at sun- 

 down sometimes come living pheasants to roost in the interstices of the balustrades and 

 the overhanging hieroglyphiced walls. 



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