no A MONOGRAPH OF THE PHEASANTS 



with scores of small orange globes, the fruit, and when one runs against the stem, one 

 must never pull and lose one's temper, but carefully disentangle the ingenious trap. 



Face-high are myriads of young plants, all shooting up manfully, hoping ever for the 

 death and fall of one of the giants high overhead — their only hope for continued life. No 

 two trunks are alike. One has many deep depressions in which water lodges, and affords 

 a home for hosts of creatures — tree-toads lay their eggs therein, little water-striders 

 circle about ; each is a tiny ocean with its shallows and its depths, its everlasting game 

 of life and death. Other trunks are clothed with leaves of creeping, clinging vines, 

 some dark, lustrous, and covered with a thick mat of long hair, others shiny, wax-like. 



Hardly a leaf in the whole jungle is perfect. Some are covered with a beautiful 

 tracery of fungi ; on other plants a score of leaves may present similar patterns of 

 holes or scallops, showing where some insect had attacked them while yet in the 

 enveloping bud. 



The jungle growth brings death to our notice much more often than life. True, the 

 new shoots are here, there, everywhere ; but they grow quietly, and their drooping leaves 

 are not conspicuous. But on every shrub, or vine, or tree, hang dead or dying leaves. 

 Thousands are barely attached, ready at the next breath of air to fall. The commonest 

 sound in the jungle — either in a wind or in a dead calm — is the flick, flick, of falling 

 leaves, the sharper crack and thud of fruit or twigs, and now and then the long-drawn- 

 out crash of a tree itself. 



Small need have the denizens of the jungle to adopt protective colouring, at least 

 from our eyes. For every conceivable pattern — brilliant or dull — on scale, or fur or 

 feather, there are a score to match it or go one better among the living and dead vegeta- 

 tion. A kallima butterfly flits by, the very embodiment of a dead and withered leaf. 

 Sometimes it alights in orthodox kallima fashion on the stem of a twig, again on a 

 trunk, again on the surface of some great dead leaf. This one never alighted on a green 

 leaf, at least in the twenty or twenty-five times I watched it. But our eyes are not those 

 of keen, hungry, flycatching reptiles, birds, or beasts, so who are we to say this wonderful 

 colouring is not useful to the uttermost? 



If we are near some berry or fruit tree, we will never be out of the sound of birds' 

 voices. Usually it is a flock of beautiful green fruit pigeons, which slap their wings 

 noisily, and almost always a few of the brown-eared chat-thrushes or scale-birds. Their 

 call-note is sweet and tender as that of a bluebird ; their note of alarm is the same, with 

 an element of harshness predominating. Suddenly every bird in the berry tree may 

 scream out in dire fear, and with a swish and rush a hawk will fall from the blue sky to 

 the topmost branches — successful or not, we cannot see. 



At such a time I have watched a pair of Crestless Firebacks feeding beneath a berry 

 tree, upon the fallen fruit, together vAih the insects which have collected. At the sound 

 of general alarm from the tree-tops, both birds squatted flat among the begonias, and 

 with hardly a wink of the eyelids remained motionless until the upper jungle was again 

 vocal with subdued chirps and calls. A scale-bird sang, and confidence was at once 

 restored. Hardly had they begun anew their search for food when a good-sized branch 

 crashed to the ground close at hand. It was a sudden, loud, startling sound to my ears, 

 but beyond a quick glance the pheasants paid no attention to it ; such a sound was to 

 them a harmless jungle theme, holding no chord of tragedy. 



