The game-birds, it is significant to remark—and significant because they are commonly polygamous—afford a quite remarkable series of displays, only some of which can be summarized in these pages. In every case, too, they are accompanied by conspicuous coloration and a more or less excessive development of brightly-coloured plumes, or areas of bare skin. In some, as in those wonderful birds the Tragopans, the development of bare skin, vividly coloured, and produced into pendulous folds, has attained a degree met with nowhere else among this group. These flaps, or finger-like wattles, as the case may be, under the influence of sexual excitement become turgid, and their hues enormously intensified: though beyond this fact but little else is known of their performances. In Swinhoe’s Pheasant the face is bare, the skin being covered, as in the case of the common Pheasant, with tiny villi of a vivid red colour. But when excited by the presence of a female the upper part of this face area rises high above the head like a pair of horns. With these turgid, and erect, the bird makes a series of short, semicircular rushes around his prospective mate, accompanying each of these gyrations with an angry hissing sound. The Golden, and Amherst Pheasants are among the most gorgeously clad of birds. Not their least conspicuous ornament is a cape-like frill of long, highly coloured feathers of which the birds seem to be extremely conscious; for when endeavouring to excite the female nearest him to the necessary pitch of sexual desire, he places himself sideways before her, drawing the frill round to the side facing her, and dropping the wing, in order, as it would seem, that she may miss nothing of his resplendent livery. This side of his nature he reserves for her. Intruding rivals are treated after quite another fashion, for like most of the gallinaceous birds his legs are armed with formidable spurs which can, and do, inflict the most terrible wounds: as, indeed, has been shown from the evidence of the Cock-pit in the case of game-cocks. [Illustration: Plate 18. THE “STRUTTING TURKEY.” This should be contrasted with the Peacock. Herein the tail itself is the principal ornament, the effect of which is heightened by the erection of the back-feathers, and the vivid play of colour of the “wattles” of the head.] [Illustration: _Photo copyright by W. H. Quentin._ THE DISPLAY OF THE GREAT BUSTARD. This is effected by the inflation of a great wind-bag in the neck, and the eversion of the wing and tail feathers as described in the text. [Face page 100.]