Did You Know? Taiwan Has a Blue Pheasant With a White Mohawk, and It Lives Nowhere Else

Everyone knows the pheasant on the back of the NT$1,000 bill. It’s the Mikado pheasant, Taiwan’s long-tailed mountain celebrity. But it has a cousin in the same forests that’s arguably even flashier, and a lot fewer people have heard of it: Swinhoe’s pheasant (藍腹鷴). It’s glossy blue, wears a white mohawk, and lives nowhere else on Earth.

Dressed Like a Superhero

The male looks like someone designed him on purpose. His body is a deep, shiny blue-purple. He has a white crest on his head and a white patch across the back of his neck and upper back. Bare red skin surrounds his eyes, a dark red patch sits on each shoulder, and his tail is black except for the two bright white feathers in the middle. Even his legs are red. That’s the quickest way to tell him apart from the Mikado pheasant if you’re lucky enough to meet one. The female goes for camouflage instead. She’s brown, finely barred and spotted, and almost impossible to see against the leaf litter.

Named After a Very Busy Naturalist

The bird gets its English name from Robert Swinhoe, the British consul and naturalist who first brought it to Western science in 1862. The ornithologist John Gould formally described it in 1863 and named it in Swinhoe’s honor. Swinhoe was everywhere in early Taiwan natural history. He’s the same man who described the Taiwan black bear a year later.

A Quiet Comeback

Swinhoe’s pheasants spend their days walking the floors of Taiwan’s low and mid-elevation broadleaf mountain forests. They eat fruit, seeds and the odd insect, and they move slowly and quietly. Being beautiful didn’t help them, though. Heavy hunting in the decades after the 1950s wiped them out of many areas. Today the species is protected under Taiwan’s Wildlife Conservation Act, and the IUCN lists it as Near Threatened. That’s better than endangered, but it isn’t safe yet.

How to Spot One (Politely)

• Go to the right mountains. The Dasyueshan forest road outside Taichung is famous among birders for pheasant sightings. The Forestry agency has also invited visitors to look for them around Alishan.
• Go early and drive slowly. Pheasants often wander out onto quiet forest roads, so keep your eyes on the verges.
• Stay in the car or stay still. Never chase or feed one. Give it space and it may just keep strolling past you.

Swinhoe’s pheasant joins our lineup of Taiwan’s wild locals, alongside the Taiwan blue magpie, the leopard cat and the Formosan flying fox. Taiwan’s mountains keep proving that its best-dressed residents are often the shyest. 💙

Love Taiwan’s wild side? Swinhoe’s other famous find stars on our Formosan Black Bear pop art water bottle. Or browse Taiwan Merch and carry a little Formosa with you.