186 A MONOGRAPH OF THE PHEASANTS 
to beat her out in vain. She seemed to be of a deep brown colour, and in running 
kept her head low and her tail partly erect. 
“At Lingshuy (S.E. Hainan) we found grave-mounds on the edge of the jungle 
strewn with cocks’ feathers, as if the wild fowl were in the habit of meeting on the 
mounds to fight. At Yu-lin-kan (S. Hainan) I heard them repeatedly chuckling in 
the jungle quite close to me; but there was no getting a shot at them. In the dense 
woods about Nychow (S. Hainan) they were particularly common, and we heard and 
saw them often. When put up in the open, they make at once for the covert, flying 
heavily, with the body and tail nearly perpendicular. I saw a Le man put a cock 
bird up; and marking it drop into the wood, I hastened to the spot. It gave a 
crow, ‘Tok-tok tok tok chea’—as a domestic hen does when frightened. My follower 
raised it from the thick bush with a stone; it flew a short distance, and fell again 
into the thicket. Our party returned to the boat without a Junglefowl, and we saw 
no more of them in the course of our cruise.” 
HOME LIFE 
The breeding season of the Red Junglefowl in the northern sub-Himalayan part 
of their range extends from February, when the males begin their challenging, combats 
and courtship, until the end of May, when the few hardy individuals which make 
their home well up in the hills, deposit their eggs. In central Burma eggs have been 
taken from March to June. As we follow the birds southward throughout their 
range, there is, as usual among birds in general, an increasing laxity in the precise 
limits of the nesting months, and in the Malay Peninsula young birds have been 
recorded from February to late August. 
In the first few pages of this monograph I have mentioned the courtship of the 
wild Red Junglefowl. Even in the degenerate domesticated rooster we still see hints 
of this feral chivalry, but as with flight and many habits of life this centuries-old 
inmate of our barn-yards has let his manners become sadly slipshod. Too often his 
procedure is to sidle up to a hen, and make only one or two half-hearted circlings, 
with wing awkwardly drooped, an atavistic effort to reveal beauties of plumage which 
are no longer his. Then if the hen, obeying her innate impulse, shows but slight 
interest, his patience is at an end, and the courtship degenerates into a mere rough- 
and-tumble pursuit and capture by sheer force. We see much the same thing in 
the house sparrow. 
One noteworthy thing about the courtship of the domestic cock is the rattling 
croak or harsh crooning sound he often makes when going through the display. The 
wild birds are absolutely silent when they are courting, uttering a cluck now and 
then between displays, but giving no hint of the rather coarse garrulity which 
characterizes their captive relation. 
The little definite information we have of wild birds shows that Junglefowl differ 
in no way from pheasants in general in the reliance they place in persistent showing 
off to produce some effect on the hens. Hypnotic rather than sentimental though 
this probably is, yet it is an effect gained solely through emotional channels. The 
