110 A MONOGRAPH OF THE PHEASANTS 
with scores of small orange globes, the fruit, and when one runs against the stem, one 
must never pull and lose one’s temper, but carefully disentangle the ingenious trap. 
Face-high are myriads of young plants, all shooting up manfully, hoping ever for the 
death and fall of one of the giants high overhead—their only hope for continued life. No 
two trunks are alike. One has many deep depressions in which water lodges, and affords 
a home for hosts of creatures—tree-toads lay their eggs therein, little water-striders 
circle about ; each is a tiny ocean with its shallows and its depths, its everlasting game 
of life and death. Other trunks are clothed with leaves of creeping, clinging vines, 
some dark, lustrous, and covered with a thick mat of long hair, others shiny, wax-like. 
Hardly a leaf in the whole jungle is perfect. Some are covered with a beautiful 
tracery of fungi; on other plants a score of leaves may present similar patterns of 
holes or scallops, showing where some insect had attacked them while yet in the 
enveloping bud. j 
The jungle growth brings death to our notice much more often than life. True, the 
new shoots are here, there, everywhere ; but they grow quietly, and their drooping leaves 
are not conspicuous. But on every shrub, or vine, or tree, hang dead or dying leaves. 
Thousands are barely attached, ready at the next breath of air to fall. The commonest 
~ sound in the jungle—either in a wind or in a dead calm—is the flick, flick, of falling 
leaves, the sharper crack and thud of fruit or twigs, and now and then the long-drawn- 
out crash of a tree itself. 
Small need have the denizens of the jungle to adopt protective colouring, at least 
from our eyes. For every conceivable pattern—brilliant or dull—on scale, or fur or 
feather, there are a score to match it or go one better among the living and dead vegeta- 
tion. A kallima butterfly flits by, the very embodiment of a dead and withered leaf. 
Sometimes it alights in orthodox kallima fashion on the stem of a twig, again on a 
trunk, again on the surface of some great dead leaf. This one never alighted on a green 
leaf, at least in the twenty or twenty-five times I watched it. But our eyes are not those 
of keen, hungry, flycatching reptiles, birds, or beasts, so who are we to say this wonderful 
colouring is not useful to the uttermost ? 
If we are near some berry or fruit tree, we will never be out of the sound of birds’ 
voices. Usually it is a flock of beautiful green fruit pigeons, which slap their wings 
noisily, and almost always a few of the brown-eared chat-thrushes or scale-birds. Their 
call-note is sweet and tender as that of a bluebird; their note of alarm is the same, with 
an element of harshness predominating. Suddenly every bird in the berry tree may 
scream out in dire fear, and with a swish and rush a hawk will fall from the blue sky to 
the topmost branches—successful or not, we cannot see. 
At such a time I have watched a pair of Crestless Firebacks feeding beneath a berry 
tree, upon the fallen fruit, together with the insects which have collected. At the sound 
of general alarm from the tree-tops, both birds squatted flat among the begonias, and 
with hardly a wink of the eyelids remained motionless until the upper jungle was again 
vocal with subdued chirps and calls. A scale-bird sang, and confidence was at once 
restored. Hardly had they begun anew their search for food when a good-sized branch 
crashed to the ground close at hand. It was a sudden, loud, startling sound to my ears, 
but beyond a quick glance the pheasants paid no attention to it; such a sound was to 
them a harmless jungle theme, holding no chord of tragedy. 
