ANNAM OCELLATED PHEASANT 



Rheinardius ocellatus (Elliot) 



Names. — Generic : Rheinardius^ after M. le commandant Rheinart, a French official in Hue, Cochin- 

 China, who sent the first known skin to Paris. Specific: ocellatus, Latin, ocellatus, furnished with small eyes, 

 or spots resembling eyes. English : Rheinart's or Annam Ocellated Pheasant. German : Rheinardts Fasan, 

 French : Argus de Rheinart ou Rheinarte ocelle. Native : Tri (Annam). 



Type. — Locality: Unknown. Describer : Elliot. Place of Description : Ann. Mag. Nat. His. (4) VHL 

 1871, p. 119. Location of Type: Four feathers in the Paris Museum. 



Brief Description. — Male : An erect, hairy nuchal crest. General colour dark brown, mixed, especially 

 below, with rufous, and thickly covered with small whitish buff spots and markings. Central tail-feathers 

 greatly elongated. These and upper tail-coverts with large chestnut spots and markings, those near the shaft 

 with black centres. Outer tail-feathers reddish brown, thickly covered with round white spots surrounded 

 with black rings. Female : Crest shorter. Olive brown above, mottled with black and buff, more strongly 

 on secondaries and tail-feathers. Brown below, finely mottled with black. 



Range. — Mountain forests of Western Annam. 



GENERAL DISTRIBUTION 



Little is known of the exact range of this form of Ocellated Pheasant. It is 

 known to occur in the mountains of the central and western part of Annam, but 

 has not yet been recorded from the Meking or beyond. It is unknown on the coastal 

 plains and in the southern part of French territory, in Cochin-China proper. Yet 

 its very close relation to the species nigrescens from the Malay Peninsula would 

 indicate that the range of the two forms must approach one another, or at least 

 formerly did so. 



GENERAL ACCOUNT 



Comparatively little is known of this magnificent bird, so that our account 

 must deal altogether too much with the least interesting phase of its monographic 

 treatment, its discovery by man and its subsequent literary vicissitudes. 



Many years ago there were found in the Museum d'histoire naturelle de Paris 

 several feathers of unknown origin and source. M. Jules Verreaux, after studying 

 these, came to the conclusion that they represented a new species of argus pheasant, 

 for which he proposed the name of ocellatus. As far as we know he recorded this 

 name only in manuscript, and the first mention of it is in 1856 by Bonaparte in 

 his Tableaux paralleliques de Fordre des Galliimces (" Comptes rendus de I'Acaddmie 

 des Sciences," XLII. 1856, p. 878). Whether Verreaux wrote Argus or Argusanus 

 is not clear, but the latter generic term is the one used by Bonaparte. Sclater and 

 Gray both accepted this name, but neither Bonaparte nor they gave any description 

 of the feathers. Elliot corrected this in 1 871 in a careful description of the colour 



and pattern, and the following year (''Monograph of the Phasianidae," I. 1872, pi. 13) 



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