40



Sydney Porter—Wanderings in the Far East



and perhaps the most beautiful of a very beautiful family. I was pleased

to see that these fine birds have now reappeared after being absent

from the market for so many years.


There was also a goodly crowd of Blue Crossoptilon. These were

wild-caught birds and not bred by the Chinese. They differed

in no way from four birds which were very kindly presented to me by

M. Delacour ; in fact, these birds seemed almost a clearer blue than the

wild ones. The wild birds differed in being slightly smaller and in having

the long flowing barbs of the central tail feathers shorter than those

of the domesticated ones.


Then there were the Koklass Pheasants, small, dapper, and

beautifully marked birds. These may have been Pucrasia xanthos'pila,

but I could not be quite sure of the species.


There were many specimens of a very dark ringless type of Pheasant

(Phasianus), which may have been the Elegant Pheasant. This bird

looked almost as dark as a Versicolor.


I was fortunate in being able to spend an afternoon with the person

who had collected these Pheasants, and I heard much about the wild

life of them. In the hope that this second-hand information will throw

a little light on the lives of these rare and little known birds, I set it

down here for what it is worth. I made careful notes at the time, so

am not trusting to memory.


Many misstatements have been made about the status of the various

rare Pheasants, authors merely repeating these erroneous statements

without ever troubling to verify them. It is amazing how, when some

so-called authority makes a misstatement, such as the case of the Argus

Pheasant pushing its head through its wing-feathers during display

to peep at the hen, that this should have been repeated ad lib by almost

every proceeding author, including even Beebe, the greatest authority

on Pheasants, without even being questioned or verified.


In the first place, the homes of these Pheasants are on the great

mountain ranges of Western Szechuan, one of the most remote of Chinese

provinces. It is situated where the great mountain ranges of India,

Burma, Tibet, and Yunnan meet in the very heart of Asia. In many

cases the ranges tower over 20,000 feet. The country is of great fertility,

the valleys being very densely populated ; in fact, the population of



