MALAY BRONZED-TAILED PEACOCK PHEASANT 47 



gay little flower faces, calling to the passing bees with colour and perfume for help in 

 perpetuating their kind, so in the dull plumage of the bird we know there are hidden 

 many jewels of colour — mirrors, chermin, as the Malays poetically call them — which in 

 due season will be flashed forth to help in some potent way in the winning of a mate ; 

 like the hue of the flowers, an aid in the continuance of its race. 



DETAILED DESCRIPTION 



Adult Male. — Forehead and crown dark grey with a narrow shaft-streak. On 

 the lores, nape, side and hind neck, the white becomes a sub-terminal spot, increasing in 

 size and extent on the anterior side neck and around to the feathers of the face, chin and 

 throat, which are white with broad dark margins. The under-surface is a continuation 

 of the cephalic dark grey, which becomes black with very faint bufly vermiculations. 

 On the lower hind neck the whitish shaft-spot persists and the disintegration of the 

 feathers gives a grizzled effect to what otherwise would be a rather pronounced grey 

 vermiculation on black. The visible portion of the remaining dorsal plumage becomes 

 rich chestnut, vermiculated with black. Each feather has a round sub-terminal black 

 ocellus with violet-blue centre, set in a small solid chestnut zone, and flanked basally by 

 a conspicuous shaft-spot of pale buff. The basal portion of the feather pales into a grey 

 background with very strong and coarse black vermiculation. In full-plumaged males 

 the ocelli persist strongly developed to the very rump. In younger birds they die out 

 on the mid-back, a second good-sized buff spot appearing at the distal pole of the 

 decreasing ocellus, while on the rump this spot, in a tiny black area, is all that remains 

 to break the coarse mottling of chestnut and black. 



The wing-coverts and inner secondaries differ in no way from the mantle, the ocelli 

 disappearing abruptly on the eighth secondary. The remaining outer secondaries are 

 brownish black with diminishing rufous or buff mottling on the outer webs. The 

 primaries are quite plain brownish black. 



The tail-feathers are twenty in number, not sixteen, as has been usually supposed. 

 Both the upper tail-coverts and rectrices are black, thickly covered with rather angular 

 dots, chestnut on the former, bufly on the central and whitish on the lateral rectrices, 

 where also they are much more round and regular. 



Taking the longest row of coverts, the central pair are quite plain, the 2nd pair 

 bear two large, equal, well-separated ocelli, while on the next five lateral pairs the two 

 eye-spots are merged along the shaft for most of their length, and the outer is somewhat 

 the larger. 



The central pair of rectrices in fully adult birds may be wholly unornamented, or 

 each feather may have an ocellus on the outer web. This may be an incipient, oval 

 patch of black pigment, or the ocellus may be fully developed and iridescent, an inch 

 and a half in length in the centre of the web. Or such an ocellus may be developed 

 on one feather and the other be wholly without a trace. Whatever the condition of the 

 ocelli on the central rectrices, these ornaments are always present on the lateral feathers, 

 although they are of greater extent when the central pair of feathers shows one or both, 

 while on the other hand very rarely they are absent from the 2nd pair as well as the 

 central. 



