Animal · China, Kazakhstan, Russia
Common pheasant
Phasianus colchicus — the name this animal has in the language scientists everywhere share.
The common pheasant is a large ground bird whose male wears copper-red feathers, a bottle-green head and a tail longer than his body. Females are plain brown so that they almost disappear when they sit on their nest in the grass.
Picture credit: Rudolphous (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Estormiz (CC0) · Gunnar Creutz (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where does the common pheasant live?
Home: Farmland, hedgerows and open woodland in Asia and Europe.
In the wild it lives in these countries: China, Kazakhstan, Russia, Georgia, the United Kingdom, Germany, Poland, the United States.
Conservation status from the IUCN: not in danger.
The short profile
Fully grown: 60-89 cm long, of which about 50 cm is tail (male). It weighs about 1.1 kilograms. On the menu: both plants and meat.
The story behind it
Pheasants came originally from Asia, but people have carried them around the world for hundreds of years, so today they run through fields in Europe and North America as well. They spend almost all their time on the ground, scratching for seeds, berries, worms and insects, and they only fly when something startles them. Then they burst upwards with a loud whirr of wings, glide a short way and land again. A hen lays eight to fifteen eggs in a shallow hollow lined with grass, and the chicks can follow her within hours of hatching. At night the whole family flies up into a tree to sleep, safely out of reach of foxes.
Find it on the globe
Common pheasant is there as a tiny animated figure that breathes and looks around. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Can pheasants fly?
Yes, but only in short bursts. A pheasant runs away from danger if it can, and when it must fly it shoots almost straight up with loud wingbeats, glides a little way and drops back into cover.
What do pheasants eat?
Almost anything they find on the ground: seeds, grain, berries, buds and green leaves, along with insects, slugs and earthworms. Chicks eat mainly insects during their first weeks, because they need the protein to grow.
Why is the male pheasant so colourful?
The copper feathers, the green head and the red face patches are how a cock shows hens that he is strong and healthy. The hen stays dull brown for the opposite reason: she sits on her eggs on open ground and needs to be hard to see.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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