Mane Of Glory - The Kalij Pheasant

Pic :  1 = Black Kalij Pheasant ; Kaziranga National Park | Pics 2 - 9 = Male & Female Kalij Pheasants ; Sattal | Pics : 10 - 12 = Black Kalij Pheasant ; Manas National Park

Some characters build themselves up in this game of ours. Well, they don’t do it. It’s you who does it to yourself actually cause the anticipation is a killer. Such was the case with me and The Kalij. Oh ! I’d heard so much about “The Kalij Pheasant”. Just the name starts the curiosity. Such a cool name for these chicken like birds who were supposed to be so beautiful and I’d repeatedly failed to see one in years of visiting the wild despite them being sighted in Kaziranga, so close to home. I finally saw my first in May 2023. He was a pretty dark fellow ( Pic : 1) and the light coming through the foliage, was hitting him right on his red mask of Zoro spot while the rest of him was almost black with a clover like pattern as you can see. I honestly didn’t understand then what the fuss was all about.

Cut to a few months later and I ended up in Sattal on the chase of Himalayan birds and faced with multiples of these guys on my second day there. I saw the males and lo and behold, they’d changed from black to blue with different patterns and had a MANE ( Pics : 2 - 6 ). Go figure ! Birds change colour all the time so I put that out of my mind thinking maybe I had the wrong Id in Kazi as I went on ahead with the task at hand which went along pretty well actually. These guys I was seeing there were just so beautiful and colourful. The males, in a colour gradient of blue to white and females in gold to white ( Pics : 7 - 9 ), complemented each other so beautifully. I’d never seen any birds like them before. The male just dazzles so much with his white, flowing, I don’t know whether to call it a mane or feathers They’re gorgeous. Plain and simple. If you saw one strut down the road anywhere, you’d stop and grab your phone for a picture. Guaranteed. These birds stick to the forest floor where they nest and forage. The males are famous for vibrant and elaborate courtship displays and interestingly, they fly pretty well through vegetation despite the size, shape and build. . These guys have been elevated as the Union Territory Bird of Jammu and Kashmir in 2021, where they are known as, get this “Wild Cock” ! My pun here is completely intended. LOL.

The tough trick with these guys was trying to catch them in vertical shots. I managed these while most from the set had to be horizontal. Things had to be that way cause well, we look at most of our stuff on the phone these days and that’s not really the easiest way to catch detail and size all together cause animals won’t really pose according to your frame and you have to frame according to them. It’s an ongoing challenge with so many of our subjects. They’re not really fast and don’t need any fast shutter game. Pretty much your normal pheasant, chicken, rooster kind of movements, but perhaps the most beautiful among the lot that I’ve just mentioned.

It wasn’t until I got back home and compared my recent pictures to the ones from Kazi a few months before that made me hit the search where I found that these guys have nine different sub species. The one I’d seen in Kazi was most probably the Black Kalij, while the one from Sattal was the Hamiltoni or white crested kind. Well, I sat on all of that for a couple of years and my recent trip to Manas had me run into another one of the Black kind. He was well hidden in the bush and interestingly, that’s how the locals there know The Kalij to be. Black ( Pics : 10 – 12 ). The obvious difference is the colour and the lack of the “mane” in the black kind. Guess the ones on our side of the country are just missing what gives these individuals their glamour after all huh?

Are they chicken ? No ! Chicken are also Pheasants. All of them belong to the family Phasianidae. I’m actually thankful that we domesticated some of these ground dwellers and that made them loose their colour and patterns cause the wild ones are just so pretty it’d be a damn shame to kill them just for their meat. There are around 10 kinds of Pheasants in India, not counting the Jungle fowl. Another trip up the mountains is needed to see some more of them, I recon and it’ll probably have to be at a slightly later month to catch em out.

Oh and ! The Pheasant came first, much before the Chicken or it’s Egg.