Golden Pheasant

About the golden pheasant

The golden pheasant, also known as the Chinese pheasant or rainbow pheasant, is a gamebird in the order Galliformes and the pheasant family, Phasianidae. Its genus name comes from Ancient Greek words meaning "with golden crest," while its species name is Latin for "painted." Carl Linnaeus formally described the bird in 1758, giving China as its original type location; it was later placed, alongside the closely related Lady Amherst's pheasant, in the genus Chrysolophus.

The adult male is the more dramatic of the two sexes, reaching about 100 cm (39 in) in length — two-thirds of which is tail — and weighing around 500 to 700 g (1 to 2 lb). His plumage combines a golden crest and rump with a bright red body, an orange ruff or "cape" that can be spread into an alternating black-and-orange fan covering most of the face, and a bright yellow eye with a pinpoint black pupil. The upper back is green, the rest of the back and rump golden-yellow, the wing tertials blue, and the scapulars dark red; the central tail feathers are black spotted with cinnamon, tipped in cinnamon buff. The female, by contrast, measures only 60 to 80 cm (24 to 31 in) — with a proportionally longer tail making up about half her length — and weighs around 350 g (1 lb). Her plumage is a duller, mottled brown, similar to a female common pheasant but darker and more slender, with a barred buff-and-blackish-brown breast and sides, a plain buff abdomen, and a buff face and throat. Both sexes have yellow legs and bills, and some abnormal females can develop patches of male-type plumage later in life.

Behavior and diet

Golden pheasants feed on the ground, taking grain, leaves, and invertebrates, but roost in trees at night. In winter, flocks tend to forage near human settlements at forest edges, feeding mainly on wheat leaves and seeds. Though capable of short, clumsy bursts of flight, they prefer to run and spend most of their time on the ground; this "flapping flight" style is linked to the absence of a deep layer of a particular flight muscle commonly attributed to stabilizing flight in other birds, a trait golden pheasants share with other ground-dwelling birds that rely on running rather than flying to escape predators.

Breeding females lay 8 to 12 eggs at a time, incubating them for around 22 to 23 days. The diet more broadly includes berries, grubs, and seeds along with other vegetation. Males give a distinctive metallic call during the breeding season. In captivity, the species is popular in zoos and aviaries, though captive-bred birds often carry some Lady Amherst's pheasant ancestry through hybridization. Breeders also maintain a number of color mutations beyond the wild type — including dark-throated, yellow, cinnamon, salmon, peach, splash, mahogany, and silver forms — with the original wild coloring referred to as "red-golden" to distinguish it from these variants. Research on captive males has found that the hue, brightness, and chroma of their feathers correlate with the diversity of a key part of their immune system, suggesting plumage quality can signal genetic quality.

Range and habitat

The golden pheasant is native to forested, mountainous areas of western China. Beyond its native range, feral populations have become established in a striking number of other countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, the Falkland Islands, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand. In Great Britain, the species was first recorded free-ranging in Norfolk in 1845 and was subsequently released at various sites in England and Scotland; British populations peaked at 1,000 to 2,000 individuals in the 1980s and 1990s before declining due to fewer releases and rising predation by goshawks, with most survivors now concentrated in Norfolk and Suffolk. In Hawaii, golden pheasants introduced to Maui before 1996 have established a reproducing population in the Waikamoi Preserve, with secondary groups later found in the Hanawī Natural Area Reserve and Haleakalā National Park, occupying elevations between about 1,700 and 2,400 m (5,577 to 7,874 ft) on the island's windward slope.

Conservation status

The golden pheasant is classified as Least Concern (LC) on the IUCN Red List. It has a widespread native range in western China, along with numerous self-sustaining feral populations established around the world through releases for hunting estates and aviculture, even as some regional feral populations, such as those in Great Britain, have fluctuated due to predation and changes in release practices.