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Lady Amherst's Pheasant | Chrysolophus amherstiae
Lady-amherstfazant | Faisán de Lady Amherst | Diamantfasan | פסיון סהרוני | Faisan de Lady Amherst
A pheasant in black, white and bottle green, with a tail that trails behind it like a barred whip. Native to the mountain forests on the south-eastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau. In Europe the species derives entirely from birds imported as ornamental fowl from 1828 onwards, and the population in the British Isles has now disappeared.
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Voice
In spring the cock gives a hard, metallic, usually two-part chack-chack, much shorter and drier than a Pheasant's crow and with something of two stones struck together. In display, spreading the cape into a collar and circling the hen sideways, he adds a short hissing shoo. Outside April and May the bird is silent, and the voice cannot be separated from Golden Pheasant's.
Recording: Jelle Scharringa — CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
Identification
The cock is 100–120 cm long, some 80 cm of that a broad, gently curved tail, white with crisp black bars. On the nape he wears a cape of white feathers edged black, above it a small red crest, with a dark green mantle scaled black, snow-white underparts, a yellow rump tipped red and orange-red tail coverts. The hen is 60–68 cm, rufous brown and coarsely barred, with blue-grey legs and bare blue-grey skin around the eye.
Confusion species
Against Golden Pheasant the cock is easy: white below rather than red, a black-and-white scaled cape rather than an orange ruff, and a broad black-and-white barred tail rather than a narrow ochre one. The hybrids are the difficulty. In Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire the two lived side by side for decades and interbred freely, and red bleeding onto the belly or flanks, an orange wash over the cape feathers, or an intermediate crest and tail all point to mixed stock; pure birds became scarce. The hens are the hardest problem of all. Lady Amherst's hen is more rufous and more coarsely barred than a Golden hen, with blue-grey legs and a bare blue-grey eye-ring against the Golden hen's yellow legs. Both resemble a Common Pheasant hen, but both are smaller, barred from head to belly rather than blotched, and finer-tailed.
Habitat
Deciduous or mixed woodland with a dense, dark understorey, almost always rhododendron, or unbrashed stands of mid-growth conifer. In its native range, bamboo and shrubby montane forest between 2,000 and 3,600 m, much higher than Golden Pheasant. The bird spends the day walking through cover, feeding on rides and small clearings, and roosts in trees.
Where the bird is most at home, classified with EUNIS — the European standard for habitats.
Range and movements
Native to the south-eastern rim of the Tibetan Plateau, chiefly Sichuan and Yunnan, reaching the far north of South-East Asia. Released in the 1890s at Woburn Abbey in Bedfordshire and on the Isle of Bute, with small later nuclei elsewhere in the British Isles. The species proved extremely sedentary and in a century spread barely ten kilometres from the release sites.
- Winter
- Passage
- dark = core range, pale = thinly spread
How and when to look
There is nothing left to look for in Europe: the last reliable bird was a lone cock near Lidlington on the Greensand Ridge in Bedfordshire, last seen in 2015. Anyone who comes across one now is almost certainly looking at an escape; check for rings on both legs and for fresh, unworn plumage. In the wild the species can be found in the mountain forests of northern Yunnan and western Sichuan, where it displays in April and May.
Conservation status
Not globally threatened; the wild population is large and spread over many ranges. In the British Isles the self-supporting population in south Bedfordshire and east Buckinghamshire held 100–200 pairs at its peak around 1970, was down to some forty pairs by the turn of the century, and then collapsed. The reasons given are loss of understorey, partly through browsing by introduced Muntjac, fox predation, inbreeding in a population that never spread, and the end of restocking.
Scientific name
Chrysolophus amherstiae | (Leadbeater, 1829)
Leadbeater described the species in 1829 as Phasianus amherstiae; 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'. amherstiae honours Sarah Amherst, Countess Amherst (1762–1838), who promoted natural science during her years in India. The specimen the first description was based on came from the mountains of southern Vietnam.