Vanishing Borneo Pheasants Look Great but Won't Mate

Below is an interesting and newly-published article from NationalGeographic.com by John Roach for your reading pleasure:

In zoos Bulwer's pheasants' stunning looks elicit oohs and ahhs from visitors. But the birds themselves seem to find each other somewhat less than appealing.

As a result, they're producing no offspring—a concern to conservationists who hope to build up the species's numbers in captivity as they decline in the wild.

Also called wattled pheasants, Bulwer's pheasants (Lophura bulweri) are elusive, chicken-size birds. Males have bushy white tails and folds of brilliant blue skin on their faces. Females have brown folds of skin. The pheasants are found in the wild only on the Southeast Asian island of Borneo.

Borneo is the world's third largest island (behind Greenland and New Guinea) and is shared by the countries of Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei. In the past two decades, conservationists say, much of the island's tropical rain forest has been logged.

John Rowden is an ornithologist, or bird zoologist, with the Wildlife Conservation Society in New York City and the curator of animals at the Central Park Zoo. He has traveled to Borneo since 1999 to study Bulwer's pheasants in the wild to learn how to make the pheasants' zoo habitats more conducive for producing offspring.

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