266 A MONOGRAPH OF THE PHEASANTS 



green gloss near the tip, the fringe, however, retaining its rufous-brown colour. The 

 convexity is hardly apparent, and the shape is less truncate than in the adults. The new 

 upper-mantle plumage has only a faint gloss of green, this appearing first as two sub- 

 terminal foci or eyes in the centre of the webs. The hackles of the rump are transitional 

 between the juvenile and adult, broad, with stubby, tapering extremities and a very wide 

 disintegrated fringe of pale yellow. The black centre is often mottled with buff and 

 brown. The coverts are even less advanced, and in place of the orange red, show only a 

 faint rusty-yellow fringe. The upper tail-coverts are all bordered with yellow-buff, and 

 very imperfectly glossed with green. The tail-feathers have buff edgings, and the 

 secondaries a series of large, reddish-buff spots on the outer web, the whitish bars and 

 spots having been eliminated. The new ventral plumage shows a diminishing of the 

 red-brown, and a corresponding increase of black. 



This is the more usual style of moulting, where a gradual transition carries the 

 bird only part way to the final colouring and patterning. A week one way or the other 

 would doubtless make considerable difference in the retention or elimination of juvenile 

 characters. In fact, we have absolute proof of this in the secondaries taken as a whole 

 in a moulting bird of this age. The sequence of moult being from the outer to the inner 

 feathers, the new outer feathers are well marked with juvenile characters, while as we 

 proceed inward, the adult colours become more and more pronounced, the manufacture 

 of the immature buffy giving way to the melanism of the adult. 



Now and then, in fact in about twenty-five per cent, of the young cocks which I 

 have seen, a very interesting condition is found, usually confined to the tail and its 

 coverts, never occurring on the wings, but occasionally on the body plumage. The 

 change from youth to adult is sudden : twenty-four hours at most sees all the pigmenta- 

 tion altered, all the imperfect patterning of the juvenile repressed and succeeded at once 

 by perfect gloss and specialized shape of the adult cock's plumage. Widespread as this 

 appears to be, it is assuredly abnormal, for the plumage suffers, and the majority of the 

 feathers soon break at the point of demarcation. In such a bird, some of the side coverts 

 may be of very recent growth, and hence adult in colour ; other old lateral coverts are as 

 completely juvenile, but the recently sprouted feathers will have been caught half-way. 

 The terminal half of each feather is the purely juvenile, or feminine, mottled brown. 

 Then comes an abrupt change, and without transition appears the adult condition, in 

 width, curvature, colour and size of shaft and web, strong metallic gloss and all. The 

 sudden increase in the weight of the feather and the diameter of the shaft has resulted 

 in a top-heavy weakness, and all but one of the feathers affected have broken off, the 

 break occurring in the shaft, and not in the barbs. The point of chief interest in this is 

 not the details of the phenomenon itself, as it is clearly abnormal, but the possibility, as 

 shown by the twenty-four-hour growth of the webs, of the entire secretion of the bird's 

 pigment changing within so short a space of time. 



Abnormal though it is, this condition is at least understandable, but in two of the 

 birds in the Buitenzorg Museum, and in several which I have shot, a state of affairs still 

 more remarkable is found. The sequence is reversed. That is, the terminal portion of 

 the feather, which of course first grew out, is altogether adult, black, and iridescent 

 green, while the last two-thirds to appear are quite juvenile. Here the adult pigmenta- 

 tion must have come into action and then abruptly, within the space of a day, have 



