INDIAN PEAFOWL 185 



light colour of the chicks and females is a handicap too serious to overcome. The 

 chicks would be exposed to constant danger of discovery by their myriad enemies, and 

 the hens on the nest would be marked down in a short time by some sharp-eyed 

 carnivore. 



It is remarkable that the mutation is in the direction of extreme paleness in the 

 chick and hen, yet melanistic in the cock, the chief difference in the latter sex being 

 the wing-coverts and secondaries, which are black and green in the Black-winged bird 

 and cream-coloured marked with black in cristattts. I see no reason to consider this 

 mutation an atavism toward any ancestral plumage, nor has it anything, except 

 superficially, in common with hybrids between the two wild species of Peafowl. 



Black-winged chicks may form the entire brood (two broods of six and seven 

 respectively are recorded), or there may be but a single mutant out of five or six 

 eggs producing normal cristatus chicks. Blaauw in Holland has for many years reared 

 ten to twenty birds annually, and records that he has observed no variation, the 

 Black-winged birds in all plumages being singularly regular in colour and pattern. On 

 the whole they appear more susceptible to cold than the Indian bird, but in warmer 

 countries where both forms are kept in the same flock, the new variation has the 

 advantage in courtship. Three instances have come to my notice, in addition to those 

 mentioned by Darwin, where the mutant was consistently more successful in obtaining 

 the favour of the hens, with the result that the new form was becoming dominant, or in 

 one case had actually swamped the parent species. Like the Black-throated Golden 

 Pheasant, the Peacock mutant seems essentially a product of some subtle change in the 

 environment, incident upon captivity. 



VARIATIONS 



Aside from the parti-coloured and pure white Peafowl, we occasionally find among 

 domestic birds the phasianine phenomenon of females assuming male plumage. 



In one case a Peahen ceased to lay eggs when about twenty-two years old, and 

 year by year assumed more and more the appearance of the cock, until when she died, 

 at thirty years of age, her plumage and even her train was indistinguishable from that 

 of a male bird. 



DETAILED DESCRIPTION 



Adult Male. — Entire top of the head covered with short, curly metallic green and 

 blue feathers. Rest of the head, except the bare facial area, similar, but the featherlets 

 are not curled. From the occiput rises an erect crest of twenty to thirty feathers, about 

 60 or 70 mm. in length. The shafts are glistening white and very rigid, scantily 

 clothed with barbs up to the tip. Here a terminal fan-shaped tuft is black at the base, 

 changing abruptly to metallic bluish green. These twenty-odd feathers grow in the 

 form of a horse-shoe or three-quarters of a circle, and there is a distinct outer and inner 

 side to the little fan tufts, the inner side being less brilliant and greener. 



The neck is greenish or bluish, shading into rich metallic purplish blue on the 

 mantle and breast. Basally each feather changes to green before merging into the still 

 more basal and concealed black. Visible parts of the feathers of the mantle and back 



VOL. IV B 13 



