Common Pheasant

The common pheasant is a strongly dimorphic ground bird. Males have a very long, barred tail and brilliant copper-red, chestnut, green and purple tones, together with a bottle-green head, small crest and red facial wattles. Females and juveniles are much less conspicuous, wearing mottled brown plumage that provides ground camouflage. Colour and neck-ring patterns vary greatly among subspecies and introduced hybrid stocks. Across the species, weight ranges from roughly 0.5 to three kilograms and wingspan from fifty-six to eighty-six centimetres. (Wikipedia, general species account)

Native populations occupy a broad Asian range extending west to the Caucasus and the far southeastern edge of Europe. The species has also been released widely in Europe, North America and Oceania, chiefly as a gamebird, and introduced stocks often contain mixtures of several subspecies. Around thirty named subspecies form several geographic groups. In Mongolia, the name Mongolian pheasant has been applied to P. c. mongolicus, although that form is one part of the wider and highly variable common-pheasant complex. (Wikipedia, general species account)