9 o A MONOGRAPH OF THE PHEASANTS 



Reeves had sent skins to England he succeeded in obtaining living birds from the 

 Chinese menagerie at Macao, near Hong-Kong. For France, M. Dabry was the first to 

 obtain and successfully send living Tragopans of this species to Europe. The first one 

 recorded at the London Zoological Gardens was in 1864, and since then Temminck's 

 Tragopans have been more or less constant inmates of all the larger zoological gardens, 

 and of many private ones, both in Europe and America. In London they have bred 

 more than a dozen times, and altogether there is more than a score of records of their 

 nesting in captivity. 



Thirty-seven captive Temminck's Tragopans show an average life of about two-and- 

 a-half years, with a single record of ten years and three months. One cock bird in 

 Holland is said to have lived for fourteen years. This is a considerably stronger 

 viability than is exhibited by the Himalayan forms, and Temminck's Tragopan, being 

 distributed over a greater extent of country, and subject to more extreme changes of 

 climate in its wild state than the others, may be slightly more adaptive. 



In 1869 the first Temminck's Tragopans were hatched and reared in England, 

 although eleven were reared in Antwerp three years earlier. Owing to the successful 

 breeding of the next few years, we read everywhere in the ornithological literature of that 

 day of the great hopes entertained of its establishment as a game bird, along the lines of 

 the ring-necked pheasant. But we can now look back at the efforts of the last two score 

 years and realize that such an undertaking is impossible. Nothing could be more 

 encouraging than the immediate acceptance of nesting facilities which these birds often 

 exhibit ; but from one ailment or another the birds, both old and young, drop off, until 

 a new stock must be procured, and the last of the earlier birds will be found dead. Of 

 four places in China where these birds were being kept in captivity — two being under 

 ideal conditions — I found the result was identical : immediate success ; ultimate failure 

 to establish permanently the species. Some of our American aviculturists find diffi- 

 culty in keeping Tragopans alive more than six or eight months. In the New York 

 Zoological Park, however, we have living Temminck's Tragopans which have been in 

 the collection for more than five years. 



As this is the commonest species in captivity, so its mode of courtship is most 

 familiar, and so closely does it approximate that of the other Tragopans, that it may 

 confidently be considered as representative of all. 



In this species, as in all the Tragopans, the males are distinguished from the females 

 by a number of secondary sexual characters, not only a pair of spurs, a crest and an 

 increased brilliancy of colour of the entire plumage, but also by three dermal cephalic 

 appendages, a pair of fleshy horns and a median transverse throat lappet or wattle. I 

 shall treat of these more particularly under the detailed description of this species. 



We are all familiar with the fleshy appendages with which the cocks of pheasants 

 and fowls are decorated, but in the case of the Tragopans the wattle and horns on the 

 head are comparable more directly with the excrescences on the head of the turkey cock. 

 For, while the comb and wattles of the domestic rooster remain much the same through- 

 out the year, the Tragopan's ornaments not only gain in size and colour as the breeding 

 season approaches, but actually swell and dilate at the moment of supreme display. 

 Thus they play as active and direct a part in the courtship as the voluntary spreading of 

 the golden pheasant's ruff or the peacock's train. 



