xx INTRODUCTION 



Bootias and of Nepalese shepherds. Far to the west, among the spruces and deodars 

 of Garhwal, and Kashmir, I took horse and dandy and tonga and found wild hillmen of 

 unknown tribes waiting to help in the search. Here again I met the royal Impeyan, 

 and in addition the White-crested Kaleege, the Cheer, the Koklass, and the Western 

 Tragopan. The Indian Peafowl and the Red Junglefowl rewarded days of labour in the 

 terrible heat of the Plains, and the same Peafowl but another Junglefowl in Ceylon, 

 where I voyaged in outrigger canoes and lumbering bullock-carts, and hunted with 

 gentle-faced Tamils and hideous Veddahs. In Burma appeared the Bar-tailed and the 

 Peacock Pheasants, Horsfield's Kaleege, the Lineated and the Silvers, and along the 

 border of Tibet and Yunnan, the rare Sclater's Impeyan, Temminck's Tragopan and 

 a new species which I have called Kuser's Blood Partridge. Here I saw the White 

 Eared-Pheasant and the Amherst Pheasant along the mountain torrents, and here the 

 men were as wild as the pheasants, and the Lolos and Kachins and mongrel Chinese 

 rolled down rocks on my trail by day, and shot poisoned arrows by night at my Ghurka 

 sentries. In the Malay States, in the humid, leech-ridden jungles of Selangor, Penang 

 and Johore I found the Ocellated and the Great Argus, the Green Peafowl, the Crested 

 and the Crestless Firebacks ; and, higher up among the mountains, the Bronze-tailed 

 Peacock Pheasants. Here were no natives to help, the Malays too slothful and the 

 Sakais too timid and wild, and my memories of those heart-breaking but happy all-day 

 tramps are solitary ones. From end to end of Java I searched for the one-wattled 

 Junglefowl, to find it at last at very sea-level. Then wonderful weeks in a Dyak 

 war-canoe, through forests and over rapids, took me to the heart of Borneo, to the 

 home of the White-tailed Pheasant and the dancing arena of the Grey Argus. Three 

 separate expeditions were made into the interior of China, the first through Fokien, 

 by houseboat, then up the Yangtse, and the final one through the plague zone and by 

 palanquin and horse out into the desert regions beyond Pekin and the great wall. 

 These brought me unforgettable glimpses and unexpected knowledge of the true 

 Ring-necked Pheasants, of the Chinese Silver, Cabot's Tragopan, the Reeves, and the 

 Brown Eared-Pheasant. A Japanese reconnaissance revealed all the forms of pheasants 

 living on those islands, the Green Versicolour, and the Copper in its various subspecies. 



I should never have undertaken such a work as this on any group of birds which 

 I had not studied in their wild home. And now that I look back on the splendid 

 pheasants in their varied surroundings, I think of them as friends, as fellow living 

 organisms on this earth, whose companionship has brought both joy and sorrow, but 

 whose lives have always been a stimulus to hard, honest work ; the toil of the explorer 

 and the field naturalist, with extremes of exaltation and of physical pain which no 

 dweller in cities can ever realize. 



Handicapped as the pheasants are by long tails, decorated wings, ruffs, and the 

 most brilliantly coloured feathers, covering flesh beloved by every carnivore from 

 man to marten, these wonderful birds have found a place for themselves on mountain, 

 plain and island, and by exercise of the keenest of senses, have outwitted their foes 

 and overcome physical characters which long ago would have doomed less virile 

 groups of birds to extinction. 



My survey of their haunts made me pessimistic in regard to their future. In 

 India there seemed a slight lessening among the natives of the religious regard for wild 



