Silver Pheasant

About the Silver Pheasant

The silver pheasant (Lophura nycthemera) is a species of pheasant found in forests, mainly in mountains, of mainland Southeast Asia and eastern and southern China. It is introduced on Victoria Island in Nahuel Huapi Lake, Neuquén, Argentina and on Vancouver Island, Canada. The male is black and white, while the female is mainly brown. Both sexes have a bare red face and red legs (the latter separating it from the greyish-legged kalij pheasant). It is common in aviculture, and overall also remains common in the wild, but some of its subspecies (notably L. n. whiteheadi from Hainan, L. n. engelbachi from southern Laos, and L. n. annamensis from southern Vietnam) are rare and threatened.

The silver pheasant was formally described in 1758 by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae. He placed it with the other pheasants in the genus Phasianus and coined the binomial name Phasianus nycthemerus. He specified the type locality as China. The specific epithet nycthemerus combines the Ancient Greek νυξ/nux, νυκτος/nuktos meaning "night" with ἡμερα/hēmera meaning "day". The silver pheasant was formerly sometimes placed in the genus Gennaeus... Wikipedia →