Crested Fireback Pheasant

     The Crested Fireback Pheasant is a medium-sized Pheasant which exists in lowland forests of the Thai-Malay Peninsula, Borneo and Sumatra. These birds are widely admired for their impressive facial decorations, which play an important role during courtship displays. The vivid blue facial wattles of Crested Fireback pheasants are particularly striking. They are coupled in the male bird with a dark, purplish-blue plumage and a distinctive, bushy black crest.

     Crested Fireback pheasants have contrastingly and beautiful colored central tail feathers. These are normally white in the Sumatran and Malayan subspecies and cinnamon-buff in the subspecies from Borneo. The lower back is deep-red like the other ‘Fireback’ species (the Siamese Pheasant and the Crestless Fireback Pheasant) upon which they get their common name. And the abdomen is coppery-chestnut in Bornean males, while it’s blue-black with white streaks in the other subspecies. Generally, female Crested Fireback pheasants have a brownish plumage with a bushy brown crest and white stripes and scaling on their underparts.

     The breeding season of the Crested Fireback pheasant has not been accurately determined. But eggs have been collected in April. Clutch size is thought to be 4 to 8 eggs, which are incubated for 24 days in captivity. Although male Crested Fireback pheasants attain adult plumage in their first year, they are not fully mature until their third.