CHINESE SILVER KALEEGE 67 



This observer writes that " in spite of its being found generally in grass, rather 

 than in heavy trees or bush cover, it is not an easy bird to find, and still less easy 

 to bring to bag when once found. One imagines that such a magnificent bird must 

 be extremely conspicuous wherever found, but such is by no means the case, and I 

 have more than once stared at a motionless bird some seconds before I could make 

 it out. The stunted and thinly foliaged oaks, which are scattered about at some 

 distance from each other, give such a queer dappling of light and shade under the 

 blazing Indian sun that the outline of even glaring white objects cannot be made 

 out at once, and the broken black and white of the pheasant's back assimilates well 

 with the waving grass and the shivering, broken shadows of the oak-leaves. 

 Every breath of wind which stirs grass and leaves alters your view, and it is not 

 until the bird rushes headlong away in the open, or skulks, head and tail down like 

 some wild beast, into the nearest raspberry tangle, that you grasp the fact that you 

 have let a pheasant get away. 



"Of course, once they are on the wing they can be seen and heard from a great 

 distance, but even under these circumstances I have been sometimes so struck with 

 their beauty that I have failed to fire until too late. 



"One of my first encounters with these birds was when, working over the crest 

 of a grass ridge with my Sepoys, we suddenly put up a covey of full-grown birds, 

 and I was so fully occupied in watching these streaks of silver loveliness that I omitted 

 to fire at all, and the whole lot — I think there were seven or eight — disappeared 

 unharmed down the hill into a ravine with trees and dense undergrowth. 



"Often we used to hear these pheasants moving in front of us as our scouts 

 worked through the grass on either side of our track. The main body of our men were 

 following, but we very seldom put them up within sight. When we were working 

 uphill they continued to run ahead of us until they had crossed the ridge or crest 

 of the hill to our front, and then, when out of sight, they took to wing with much 

 fluster and noise. 



" We noticed they always ran uphill and flew down, and always seemed to make 

 for the highest point in the vicinity before taking to flight. 



"As, on the occasion of which I just wrote, we several times came on conveys 

 of full-grown cock birds without a single hen anywhere near that we could see, it 

 may have been that the hens skulked away on foot, but I think not, for the sound 

 of the running birds could be followed very clearly when the grass and fallen leaves 

 were dry and rustly. 



"They crowed much like the common English pheasant, but a shorter, deeper 

 sound. I never saw them crowing, but more than once put up cock birds from 

 spots where I had heard a vigorous crowing and flapping of wings going on the 

 moment before." 



DETAILED DESCRIPTION 



Adult Male.— Top of the head and long nuchal crest black, strongly glossed 

 with purplish blue; the crest is flowing, disintegrated and directed backward; it 

 measures sometimes 100 to no mm. in length; the length and disintegration is 

 due, not to the elongation and degeneration of barbules on many barbs, but to the 



