Male green pheasants crow in alarm at loud explosive noises such 
as thunder or gunfire. Earthquakes also trigger an immediate crowing 
response from male birds, as also occurs with the ringneck in Stateside 
coverts. The Japanese people credit the green pheasants with the 
ability to foretell earthquakes since they often crow at slight tremors, 
too gentle for humans to feel, such as frequently precede large earth- 
quakes. 
Calls 
It is reported that the male crowing calls during the breeding 
season are shorter and somewhat different than are those of the ringneck. 
Cackle-~like calls are heard when flushing a hiding bird or when loud 
noises or earthquake tremors occur. 
The early naturalist Beebe (5) said in reference to the green 
pheasants: "The cocks are untiring in their challenging in early spring, 
and so omnipresent was this sound that, when the broken crow comes to my 
ears from one of our Eastern fields or from the runway of a Zoological 
Garden it is always the memory of some Japanese landscape which the sound 
revives," 
The female is normally silent but keeps her young chicks together with 
low calls similar to those used by ringnecks in communicating with their 
young. 
Interbreeding 
It has been observed on Honshu and Kyushu by Austin and Kuroda (4) 
that the ringneck interbred freely with native wild green pheasants but 
that the resulting F, generation hybrids shortly disappeared. Almost 
none of the ringneck strain remains today in islands south of Hokkaido. 
Austin and Kuroda offer recent interbreeding considerations for the 
green pheasants and ring-necked pheasant group when they note: '"Yamashina 
(1949) considers versicolor conspecific with colchicus because he found 
the Fj hybrids between the two to be ‘totally fertile’. While this may be 
true in the breeding pens and in the laboratory, it does not agree with 
the earlier observations of the crossing of these two forms in the wild 
which showed the hybrid offspring of the Green Pheasant-Ring-necked 
Pheasant cross to be only partially fertile." Recent reports from 
Tennessee and Ohio game department personnel indicate that they find Fy 
hybrids of green pheasants and ringneck pheasants to be fertile. 
Prince Taka-Tsukasa (18) states the green pheasant is occasionally 
reported to cross with the copper pheasant. Because of crosses such as 
this the Japanese Ornithological Society (15) has reclassified the copper 
pheasant from Syrmaticus soemmerringii to Phasianus soemmerringii. 
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