The Common Pheasant 97 
We should expect such females to grow spurs, but " spurred " females, which are 
rare, are more often found amongst what seem to be perfectly healthy birds. 1 The 
whole circumstance that various genera of birds, with healthy or injured ovarium and 
oviduct, 2 should not only change the colour but the form of pattern of the feathers, is 
very remarkable, and has not yet been satisfactorily explained by physiologists. 
The artificial breeding of gallinaceous and other birds always tends in time to pro- 
duce variation, and from this rule the Pheasant is no exception. The steel-coloured 
variety known as the Bohemian Pheasant, in which the lighter parts of the feathers are 
grey-white, or yellow-tinted, is not rare, but sufficiently uncommon to be worthy of notice. 
These, with white and pied birds, are the only regular variations amongst Pheasants ; 
for those in which the dark hoops and blotches in both sexes are half-coloured blue-grey, 
with the light parts white or grey, or in females yellowish, are extremely rare, although 
a few are known in public and private collections. I have seen four or five hen 
Pheasants sandy-brown all over with the dark marking a little darker than the rest of 
the plumage; but the most remarkable variety of a Pheasant I have seen was one I 
picked up in a poulterer's shop in Cambridge, near which town it was killed in 1884. 
It was a hen assuming the cock's plumage with albinism as well. The whole of the 
upper part of the bird was a composite mixture of hen-cock and white plumage, 
extending to the tail. I exhibited the bird at the British Ornithologists' Club, and it 
was sold at Stevens with the rest of my albinoes in 1908, so that I do not know its 
present owner. 
No doubt a race of white Pheasants could easily be produced by pairing white 
birds together ; but that white cocks also tend to produce pied or white varieties I 
doubt. Mr. Tegetmeier remarks that the absence of abnormal young birds is due to the 
reason that " white cocks are doubtless driven away from the hens by the stronger and 
more vigorous dark birds, and rarely increase their kind." With this view I entirely 
disagree. I have known two pure white cocks, one at Murthly in Scotland, which lived 
for nine years, and one at Warnham, in Sussex, for seven years. Both these birds got 
their complement of hens every spring, and were not known to have been the fathers of 
any pied or white progeny. The Warnham cock was in the aviaries for several years, 
and his progeny were of the normal colour, whilst on release he seemed to hold his 
own and pair with as much freedom as any of the other wild cocks. 
P. colchicus has been known to hybridise with the common fowl, black grouse, and 
capercaillie. In the case of the first named, the crosses are exceedingly clumsy — we 
may almost say ugly birds — having none of the beauties of either parents. Pheasants 
seem to cross more freely with dark-plumaged fowls of the langshan, black hamburgh 
variety than others, but this may be purely accidental. Crosses with the speckled 
hamburgh are also common. The fowl with which the Common Pheasant will most 
readily interbreed is the game bantam. This we can readily understand. A corre- 
spondent in the Field (January g, 1909) states that he has reared several such hybrids, 
1 Mr. J. A. Jones, who has given much attention to game birds, informs me that he has a normally coloured hen with 
perfectly developed spurs. This he killed at the Rookery, Gatwick, Surrey, in October r883- 
- I possess a female redstart in more or less masculine plumage, which I captured on a nest containing four eggs in Suffolk, 
in June r88<l. 
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