Mikado Pheasant

The Mikado Pheasant is endemic to the high mountain forests of Taiwan, occurring mainly above mid-elevation in cool, misty evergreen and coniferous forest. It is one of the darkest and most strikingly glossy of the long-tailed pheasants, and its restricted range and preference for remote, high-altitude habitat kept it poorly known to science until relatively late in the twentieth century.

Male body feathers show a deep, glossy blue-black sheen across the head, breast, and back, interrupted by a clean white bar across the closed wing formed by pale-edged covert feathers. The long tail is blackish with narrow, evenly spaced white bars running across each feather, giving a striped rather than blotched pattern when compared with the broader chestnut-and-black bars of Elliot's Pheasant. Individual tail feathers are stiff-shafted and strongly graduated, with the central pair much longer than the rest. Female feathers are shorter, warm brown, and finely mottled with buff and dark streaking, lacking any gloss or white barring, distinguishing them from the similarly forest-dwelling female Elliot's Pheasant by their darker, colder brown tone.

Males are almost entirely glossy blue-black aside from the white wing bar and white-barred tail, one of the most uniformly dark pheasant plumages. Females are cryptically colored in mottled brown for camouflage while nesting on the ground. Juveniles resemble females initially, with young males gradually acquiring dark, glossy body feathers and the elongated tail over their first years. A single annual molt follows the breeding season.

Mikado Pheasants are confined to Taiwan's central mountain ranges, typically in dense montane forest well above the lowlands, including mixed conifer-broadleaf and bamboo understory zones. The species is non-migratory and sedentary, staying within forested mountain slopes year-round, sometimes shifting slightly downslope in harsh winter weather.

This species forages quietly on the forest floor for seeds, berries, shoots, and small invertebrates, usually singly or in pairs, and is generally shy and difficult to observe in the wild. Nests are ground scrapes concealed in dense understory vegetation. Calls include soft, low clucking notes and occasional harsher calls given by males during territorial or courtship encounters, typically at dawn in misty mountain forest.