Silver Pheasant Information

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The Silver Pheasant is a large, approximately 125 cm long, white pheasant with bare red facial skin, red legs and glossy black below. The male is adorned with white, long, patterned tail and black dropping crest on its crown. At least two years are needed to attain full male plumage. The female is an olive brown with black-tipped crest.

The Silver Pheasant inhabits the mountain forests of mainland Southeast Asia and China.

Widespread and a common species in most of its habitat range, the Silver Pheasant is evaluated as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

Subspecies

There are fourteen subspecies of Silver Pheasant, distributed from east Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Vietnam, China to the island of Hainan and recently seen in Smiths Station, Alabama, Bastrop, Texas and Nanaimo, British Columbia.

The nominate subspecies Lophura nycthemera nycthemera of southeastern China and northern Vietnam is the largest and whitest race. The southern subspecies have varying amounts of grey or black markings and shorter tails.

Anderson's Silver Pheasant, is described in Indian Sporting Birds by Frank Finn (1915), who gives the classification as Gennceus andersoni and suggests the bird may be a hybrid between a Silver Pheasant and the Lineated Kalij Pheasant, L. leucomelanos lineata; it is now classified as L. n. andersoni.

Finn also uses Hume and Marshall's illustration of Crawford's Silver Pheasant by A. W. Strutt (1878), which they call Euplocamus andersoni and Finn suggests could be a further cross with L. l. lineata.

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