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Golden Pheasant | Chrysolophus pictus
Goudfazant | Faisán dorado | Goldfasan | פסיון זהוב | Faisan doré
A gamebird with scarlet underparts, a golden crest and an orange cape barred with blue-black. Native to bamboo scrub on steep slopes in the mountains of East Asia. Every Golden Pheasant in the map area goes back to released ornamental stock: in the British Isles that gave rise generations ago to a feral population that gave many a birdwatcher their first Golden Pheasant, while elsewhere there is no population at all and the few birds seen are escapees.
Voice
The cock crows a hard, far-carrying, two-part chack-chack, sharpest at dawn in April and May; it is more metallic and less hoarse than a Pheasant's crow. In display, as he sweeps the cape across his bill, he adds a thin, high, metallic hiss audible only at a few metres. Outside spring the species is close to silent. Golden and Lady Amherst's cannot be told apart reliably on voice.
Recording: Jelle Scharringa — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
The cock is 90–115 cm long, roughly two-thirds of that being a long, narrow, ochre tail finely marbled with black. Add a golden-yellow crest, an orange ruff barred with narrow blue-black lines that he fans across his bill in display, a dark green mantle, a golden rump and deep red underparts; bill, legs and iris are yellow. The hen is 60–80 cm, warm sandy brown and finely barred over the whole body, with yellow legs and a tail making up about half her length.
Confusion species
The real field problem is Lady Amherst's Pheasant, and above all the hybrids between the two. A pure Golden cock is red below with an orange cape; a pure Lady Amherst's is white below with a black-and-white scaled cape. The feral birds of the British Isles sat between the two for decades: red bleeding into a partly white cape, an orange wash across black-and-white cape feathers, or a tail with too much barring all betray mixed parentage, and virtually every surviving feral Golden Pheasant carries Lady Amherst's genes. The hens are a separate puzzle. Golden hens are sandy brown, finely barred, with yellow legs; Lady Amherst's hens are more rufous, more coarsely barred, with blue-grey legs and bare blue-grey orbital skin. Both get passed off as Pheasant hens, but they are smaller, barred right across the belly rather than blotched, and shorter-tailed in proportion.
Habitat
In the British Isles, mature conifer plantation, usually Corsican and Scots pine, with a dense rhododendron understorey, plus mixed woodland with thick scrub and the evergreen cover of the Poole Harbour islands. In its native range, bamboo thickets and secondary forest on steep slopes between 600 and 2,000 m. In every case it is dark, dense woodland where the bird stays invisible all day and feeds only on rides and small clearings.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Native to the mountains of East Asia, from Shaanxi and Gansu to Guizhou. In Europe it exists only as an introduction: released on estates in the British Isles from the 1840s onwards, with strongholds in Breckland on the Norfolk–Suffolk border, around Sandringham in north-west Norfolk, on Anglesey, in Galloway and on the islands in Poole Harbour. The northern populations have died out and almost nothing is left of the southern ones. Anywhere else in Europe a Golden Pheasant is a bird escaped or released from a collection, game farm or park.
- Resident
- Breeding (summer)
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
Brownsea and Furzey Island in Poole Harbour now hold the only realistic chance in Europe, where a small group is fed; walk the boardwalks in the first hour of light and watch for birds crossing a path. Breckland and the Wolferton woods, the classic sites for decades, are effectively finished. Elsewhere in Europe, a Golden Pheasant on a woodland ride is almost always a recent escape, and it is worth checking whether it carries rings on both legs.
Conservation status
The species is not globally threatened, though it is declining in its native range through logging and trapping. In the British Isles numbers peaked at 1,000–2,000 birds in the 1980s and 1990s; a survey in 2022 and 2023 found 37–40 birds at just two sites, both dependent on feeding, predator control or restocking. The causes are the 1981 ban on releasing non-native birds, predation by Fox and Goshawk, and the clearance of rhododendron understorey.
Scientific name
Chrysolophus pictus | (Linnaeus, 1758)
Linnaeus described the species in 1758 as Phasianus pictus; because it was later moved to another genus, the author and year stand in brackets. The genus Chrysolophus was introduced in 1834 by Gray. Chrysolophus is from Ancient Greek khrusolophos 'with a golden crest', from khrusos 'gold' and lophos 'crest'. pictus is Latin for 'painted', from pingere 'to paint'. The specimen the first description was based on came from China.