Edwards's Pheasant

Appearance

The bird's length is 58–65 centimetres and has red legs and facial skin. The male is mainly blue-black with a crest, and the female is a drab brown bird. The alarm call is a "puk!-puk!-puk!".

There are two varieties; the nominate form "L. e. edwardsi" has a white crest and upper tail, whereas the northern form, usually called Vietnamese pheasant, is found with a variable number of white rectrices. This difference in the two forms may be due to inbreeding of a restricted, fragmented population there, and has also been seen in captive, inbred "L. edwardsi".

Status

In 2012 the nominate form of Edwards's pheasant have been uplisted to Critically Endangered by BirdLife International, having suffered from deforestation, hunting and the use of defoliants during the Vietnam War. The population is currently believed to number between 50 and 249 birds in the wild, mostly of the nominate form, but it is doing well in captivity, where it is the subject of ex-situ conservation. There have been no confirmed sightings of a living individual in the wild since 2000 and in 2010 the World Pheasant Association received funding from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund to survey forests in the central Vietnam provinces of Quảng Bình and Quảng Trị.

The Phong Điền Nature Reserve was initially designated to protect the Edward's pheasant after the rediscovery of the species in the area in 1996. In 2018, a photograph of a dead female Edwards's pheasant was taken in A Lưới District, which includes part of Phong Điền; this marked the first evidence of a wild Edwards's pheasant in almost 2 decades, and indicates that the species may still persist in the reserve.