MIKADO PHEASANT 20i 



has recently bred several healthy hybrids with the Elliot pheasant. These strongly 

 resemble the female Mikado, but show a trace of the black throat and the rufous barring 

 of the tail. 



DETAILED DESCRIPTION 



Adult Male. — Feathers around nostril, forehead, ear-coverts, chin and throat, 

 dead black. Crown, nape, sides of neck, and lower cheeks glossed with blue green. 

 Breast and mantle dead black, the wide, visible border dark violet, with a good-sized, 

 sub-terminal, hemispherical spot at the end of the shaft, appearing velvety jet black 

 when viewed toward the light, shining blue away from the light. 



This spot is caused by an actual physical alteration of the barbules. When the 

 feather is held against white paper or the light, the spot is revealed as a rounded or 

 blunt triangle of very transparent vane area. The barbules in the specialized zone are 

 slightly shorter and stouter than normal ones, but this difference is more apparent than 

 real. The chief point of distinction is that both rows of barbules are rather closely 

 apposed along the upper side of the barbs, being raised at a sharp angle above the dorsal 

 plane of the feather, thus giving the barbs a narrower, more isolated appearance, and 

 preventing any possibility of interlocking of the very few barbicles present. This change 

 of angle causes the alteration of apparent colour, the spot showing as black when the 

 terminal fringe appears violet, and as bluish-violet when a shift of light alters the feather 

 fringe to black. 



Back and rump jet black, with a narrow terminal fringe of steel blue. Coverts 

 similar, the fringe becoming green on the middle and outer margins of the greater 

 coverts, and the tertiaries and inner secondaries being glossed with green. 



In the closed wing the only visible wing-marking is a transverse bar caused by the 

 broad white tips of the line of greater coverts. As a matter of fact, all the secondaries 

 themselves are more narrowly tipped with white, but this is invisible in the closed wing, 

 except from the 9th or loth inward, where the feathers begin to shorten in a line up the 

 inner border of the wing. On the succeeding five or six the slender, wedge-shaped, 

 terminal shaft-marks of white show very conspicuously, this line meeting the transverse 

 line of white on the coverts at an obtuse angle. 



Although ordinarily wholly concealed from view, there are from twenty to forty 

 other coverts marked with white, in the form of short, narrow shaft-stripes on the 

 median coverts, and good-sized round shaft-spots on many of the lesser coverts. Some- 

 times all but a score of the wing-coverts are marked in some way with white. In a few 

 individuals these white spots show beyond the edges of the overlapping lesser 

 coverts. 



The secondaries are glossy black, the primaries dark brown, with paler brown 

 shafts. 



The short upper tail-coverts depart abruptly from the pattern and colour of the 

 rump feathers, the narrow terminal fringe changing from steel blue to white, while at 

 the same time rounded, basal spots appear, which increase into angular lines, and on the 

 longer coverts into regular, narrow, straight, transverse white bars, somewhat clouded 

 with dark-brown mottling. 



The rectrices are similar to the tail-coverts, the lateral ones with broken bars or 



VOL. Ill D D 



