MALAY BRONZE-TAILED PEACOCK PHEASANT 45 



coastal levels, while the other is a true mountain bird. It may be looked for in humid, 

 dark ravines above three thousand feet. 



I have found it not uncommon in the mountains about Semangko Pass, especially 

 to the eastward on the Pahang side of the divide. In Selangor it has been recorded on 

 Gunong Mengkuang Lebah, from four to five thousand eight hundred feet, and 

 Gunong Ulu Kali. In Pahang it has been found at Ulu Dong, and at three thousand 

 feet on Gunong Tahan, although rare in the last vicinity. How much farther to the 

 north and south this species extends we do not know, probably farther in the latter 

 direction, toward the range of its congener in Sumatra. 



GENERAL ACCOUNT 



As the Malay Bronze-tail was the only member of this group of pheasants which I 

 expected to be able to study, and as our only information concerning it thus far had 

 come from dried skins, I was very anxious to find and observe it in life. But many 

 days passed after I reached its haunts before I was able to catch even the glimpse of it 

 which I have narrated. 



I made Semangko Pass my base of exploration, that gap over which the trail leads, 

 from Selangor into Pahang, at about twenty-seven hundred feet elevation. I climbed 

 the ascending peaks to a height of almost forty-five hundred feet, creeping laboriously 

 through bamboo tangles, or holding on to long liana guy ropes, along steep, pathless 

 banks. Then I crossed over to the Pahang side and worked northward along the range. 

 The going was fearfully rough, sometimes confining a day's tramp to three or four miles. 

 Here, however, as I have detailed, I at last found the birds. 



The day which followed my encounter with the flock of five was rainy, cloud after 

 cloud passing over and loosing its tropical downpour, but I crept up the sandy bed of 

 the tumbling creek, through the ravine from which, yesterday, the pheasants had come. 

 I saw but one bird and secured it, a male in unmoulted, rather worn plumage. It must 

 have been feeding at daybreak, so well filled was the crop. It had devoured a motley 

 assortment of the small folk who dwell in rotten logs : spiders, white ants, several grubs 

 and two weirdly strange, flat creatures, looking like the trilobites of Devonian times, 

 and even more of a puzzle. For although they have been kept alive for months, it is yet 

 not known whether they are insect or crustacean. Robinson says that this pheasant 

 feeds on insects, millipedes and the fruit of a creeping rotan. 



On another later trip in this same region an old Malay hunter, on seeing a painting 

 of the Bronze-tailed Pheasant, said he had shot many, and knew where one had nested a 

 few months before. After much persuasion he led me to the spot — a long, arduous 

 tramp through difficult bamboo jungle. At an elevation of about thirty-two hundred 

 feet we entered a rocky defile, and half-way up the opposite slope he pointed at the spot, 

 well marked by two great trees which had fallen parallel to one another. Close to the 

 hollow made by the great roots tearing out, the Malay said he had shot the bird on her 

 nest and eaten her. He said there were two white eggs, one of which was broken by 

 the shot, the other he ate. There was, of course, no visible nest hollow, and the low 

 growth of variegated leaves was unbroken. He had been resting on a large branch 

 waiting for game when the bird walked into sight and settled down upon her eggs. 



