THE GREY PEACOCK PHEASANT 67 



into the air, the shock often mercifully killing it at once, but in any event lifting it 

 high above the reach of the civet cats, jackals and the numerous other small carni- 

 vores which would leave only a pile of feathers were the bird within leaping distance 

 of the ground. The snaring of the bird when it comes to its nest, by means of a 

 cone-shaped basket woven of grass, to which I have already alluded, is an unusual 

 method practised in Tenasserim. 



DETAILED DESCRIPTION 



Adult Male. — Feathers on the crown elongated, disintegrated and recurved, 

 forming quite a conspicuous brush-like crest. This crest is brownish black, finely 

 barred with white. In fully adult birds the white predominates, giving a frosted 

 appearance. The nape and hind-neck feathers are also long and loose webbed, but 

 the white gives place to brown, and the barring is coarser. The entire upper plumage 

 is brown, varying from dark sepia to fuscous or dark brown in different individuals. 

 All this portion of the plumage, including the mantle, scapulars, back, wings (except the 

 primaries), rump, tail-coverts and tail, is profusely speckled and spotted with white or 

 buffy white, with a slight tendency to the formation of a mottled terminal band on the 

 back and rump. The spots increase in size from the mantle to the tail. The mantle, 

 scapulars, wing-coverts and tertiaries are all tipped with a band of white, within which 

 lies a round, iridescent ocellus framed in complete rings of black and brown. This 

 metallic eye is dark green, shading into violet at the distal border, and giving purple 

 and blue reflections in certain lights. On the upper mantle, where these spots appear, 

 they are first seen as a small, dull-brown circle with a darkened centre. The iridescence 

 shows first as a narrow elliptical shaft streak, and this changes at once into a small but 

 perfect and round ocellus. These anterior ones are less than 10 mm. in diameter, while 

 on the tertiaries they are 15 mm. across. 



The primaries are plain dull brown, faintly mottled with buffy white on the outer 

 web, and their coverts are devoid of ocelli. The secondaries show an abrupt change, a 

 heavy dotting of white, especially on the outer web, where many of the spots are angular. 

 All the secondary coverts have very large ocelli. The occurrence of spots on the 

 secondaries themselves shows much variation. At one extreme the outermost seven 

 show no ocelli ; in the 8th the spot is asymmetrical, the metallic portion being confined 

 to the outer web, while from the 9th inwards it is very large and perfect. Again, a hint 

 of the ocellus may occur even on the 5th secondary, in the ce7'itre of the outer web, a 

 small clouded nucleus which is really only a dulling of the white spots. In the next 

 feather the spot has enlarged, it has a very dark, non-iridescent centre, but has not quite 

 reached the shaft. The 7th secondary shows the eye broken across the shaft, but smaller 

 on the inner side, with the gloss still confined to the outer web, while in the next two 

 feathers the symmetrical perfection of the ocellus is attained. 



The ocelli die out abruptly on the lower mantle, so that the lower back, rump and 

 shorter upper tail-coverts are unmarked. The tail-feathers and the longer coverts each 

 have two ocelli, one in the centre of each web, framed in black and brown, but with the 

 white circle lacking or prominent only on the proximal side. 



The longer, ocellated tail-coverts are very interesting. They really form a secondary 

 tail, being sharply differentiated from the remaining coverts, which sprout more or less 



