Volume 5, Plate XVIII* / Ornithology (Birds)

Golden Pheasant

Phasianus pictus

The most gaudy of its race, this crested pheasant of China bears a hood-like ruff of broad golden-orange and black feathers raised at will, with long stiff hackle-like plumes upon the rump and a broad folded bending tail. So splendid that words fail to convey its brightness, it is kept in domestication and procured from southern England, the brownish female broken with black crescent bars and short-tailed.