PHEASANTS. 
43 1 
In total length the bird measures 6 feet from the bill to the end of the tail. 
The female has the general coloration of the male, but lacks the beautiful 
ornamental marking, as well as the enormously developed secondaries and middle 
tail-feathers. Davison writes that these pheasants are quite solitary, every male 
having “ his own ‘ drawing-room,’ of which he is excessively proud, and which 
he keeps scrupulously clean. They haunt exclusively the depths of the ever-green 
forests, and each male chooses some open level spot—sometimes down in a dark, 
gloomy ravine, entirely surrounded and shut in by dense cane-brakes and rank 
vegetation—sometimes on the top of a hill where the jungle is comparatively 
open—from which he clears all the dead leaves and weeds for a space of six or 
eight yards square until nothing but the bare clean earth remains, and thereafter 
he keeps this place scrupulously clean, removing carefully every dead leaf or twig 
that may happen to fall on it from the trees above. These cleared spaces 
are undoubtedly used as dancing-grounds, but personally I have never seen 
a bird dancing in them, but have always found the proprietor either seated 
quietly in, or moving backwards and forwards slowly about them, calling at 
short intervals, except in the morning and evening, when they roam about 
to feed and drink. The males are always to be found at home, and roost on some 
tree close by.” 
Reinhard’s Another allied pheasant is Reinhard’s argus (Reinhardius 
Ar & us - ocellatus), from the mountains in the interior of Tonkin, in which 
the secondary quills are not longer than the primaries, though in the male the 
middle pair of tail-feathers are enormously lengthened, wide at the base, and 
tapering to the extremity. The male measures about 7 feet, from the bill to the 
. end of the tail. 
Pea Fowl The gorgeously coloured pea-fowl differ from all the birds 
already noticed in having the upper tail-coverts developed into a 
long train far exceeding the tail in length. The common species (Pavo cristatus), 
of India, Assam, and Ceylon is too familiar to require description, but in the 
Indo-Chinese countries, ranging in the north from Chittagong, westwards through 
Siam to Cochin-China, and south through the Malay Peninsula to Java and 
possibly Sumatra, there occurs the Burmese pea-fowl (P. muticus), the male 
of which is distinguished by having the crest-feathers more elongate and equally 
webbed on each side of the shafts, while the wing-coverts and scapulars are black. 
Widely, though locally, distributed over the whole of India, the common species 
prefers broken and jungly ground in the neighbourhood of water and cultivation, 
but does not, as a rule, range to an elevation of more than four thousand feet, 
though it has been obtained as high as six thousand. In India the Hindus regard 
the pea-fowl with a superstitious reverence, and object to their being shot; and in 
native Hindu States, the prohibition being absolute, they are unmolested either by 
Europeans or natives. A variety of the pea-fowl has the whole of the wing- 
coverts, scapulars, and secondaries brownish black, glossed with purple and edged 
with green, and the thighs black instead of buff. It closely resembles hybrids 
between the two species already mentioned, but arises independently in flocks of 
the common pea-fowl which have been pure bred for years. Possibly it may be 
a case of reversion to the ancestral type, being unknown in a wild state. 
