Covered head to tail in vivid shades of blue and green, this bird tops of his stunning appearance off with a highly conspicuous mohawk, making him highly conspicuous wherever he goes.
Meet the Palawan Peacock-Pheasant
Photo Courtesy of capronparkzoo.com
The Palawan peacock-pheasant (Polyplectron napoleonis), is a medium-sized (up to 50 cm long) bird in the Phasianidae family. This bird has iridescent blue-green plumage topped off with an iridescent green mohawk. His belly is black with white stripes above and below. His brown eyes contrast beautifully with his colorful plumage.
Photo Courtesy of Salix / Wikimedia Commons / CC BY-SA 3.0
Don’t forget his eyecatching peacock-like tail, each tail plume, and upper-tail covert is marked with highly iridescent, light-reflective, ocelli.
Where the male birds are stunning, female Palawan peacock-pheasants are a more dull grey-brown in color.
Photo Courtesy of Dante Alighieri / CC BY-SA 3.0
Palawan peacock-pheasants are native to the island of Palawan in the southern Philippines, where they are ground dwellers preferring dense vegetation.
These birds like to dine on seeds, nuts, berries, and fruit, as well as worms, insects, and slugs.
During the mating season, the male will offer the female bird food, hoping she will accept. If she does he will then put on a show for her, fanning his tail and compressing his wings. Once they have mated, she will lay w eggs and incubate them for 18-20 days. Once they have hatched, both the male and female will rear the young until they have fully fledged at around two years of age.
Photo Courtesy of Francesco Veronesi/CC BY-SA 2.0
The population of the Palawan peacock-pheasant has had a sharp decline in recent years due to loss of habitat. Additional pressure has been placed on their population due to trapping for the caged-bird trade couple with meat consumption. Now endangered in their natural habitat, thankfully there is still hope for this bird as the Palawan Islands are now a Biosphere Reserve.
Watch and listen to this bird right here in the video below:
H/T Wikipedia – Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
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