. A general history of birds . lls blue,marked with bars of dusky ; greater quills deep blue black ; the tailis pale rufous, of a great length, and cuneiform; the two middlefeathers of double the length of any of the others, the outmost veryshort; all of them pointed at the ends, and crossed with numerousbars of dusky on the two middle ones, the others in proportion; thethighs are blue ; legs dusky, and not furnished with spurs. I met with a figure of tlie above among the drawings of Sir , which says,—it inhabits China, called the GoldenPheasant, and found in the Surinagur Hills; b
. A general history of birds . lls blue,marked with bars of dusky ; greater quills deep blue black ; the tailis pale rufous, of a great length, and cuneiform; the two middlefeathers of double the length of any of the others, the outmost veryshort; all of them pointed at the ends, and crossed with numerousbars of dusky on the two middle ones, the others in proportion; thethighs are blue ; legs dusky, and not furnished with spurs. I met with a figure of tlie above among the drawings of Sir , which says,—it inhabits China, called the GoldenPheasant, and found in the Surinagur Hills; but from the writingbeneath it, in the Persian language, it is said that the name isDoom durauz (Long-tail), and found in the snowy mountains ofSurinagur; that the drawing is a quarter of the natural size, andthe weight of the bird half a sare :* hence, as the length of the birdin the drawing, from bill to rump, is six inches and a half, and the * A sare is about two pounds, though not exactly the same every where. :. PHEASANT. 197 tail eleven inches, making in all seventeen inches and a half, it willmake the length of the real subject to be six feet. How far this bird is allied to the Gold Pheasant is not for us tosay, but certainly the colours of the plumage, as well as distribu-tion, will scarcely justify us in making it a distinct species; for inrespect to the tail and its coverts it differs very materially; beingwholly without the fine narrow crimson feathers, which hang downover the sides of the tail from the base; besides which, instead ofthe mottled, and variegated colours on the tail, all of them arecrossed with numerous black bars; from this circumstance I havean idea of this bird being the species to which the long featherbelongs, as first mentioned in Vol. iv. p. 710, of my Gen. Synopsis,and is now figured in the plate opposite ; the general colour of thisfeather is fine blue grey, margined on the sides with rufous cream-colour, and marked on each side of
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Keywords: ., bookauthorlatham, bookcentury1800, booksubjectbirds, bookyear1821
