Believed to be Extinct Lady Amherst’s Pheasant Shocked Everyone with a Sighting

A student may have found a rare exotic bird that has been thought to be extinct in the United Kingdom.

The fowl, known as Lady Amherst's pheasant, is a sight to see. It has a red crest and plumage that is brilliantly colored in orange, blue, green, and purple. Its tail feather is long and exaggerated in a black and white pattern, measuring 3 to 4 feet in length.

Lady Amherst's Pheasant's largest British population developed itself along the Greensand Ridge of Bedfordshire, extending spontaneously west into Buckinghamshire after the species' deliberate arrival at Woburn in the 1890s. The area's dense mixed fir, ash, oak, and beech woodlands (with an added rhododendron understory) tend to be a reasonable substitute for the area's native deciduous forest and bamboo thickets. Related habitat elsewhere in the UK, on the other hand, seems to have struggled to support several other introduction attempts over the last two centuries.

By any interpretation, this seems to be an extinction curve, and given that the species has only been present in Britain for about 125 years - at times chemically fed - it may be suggested that, like the Red-winged Laughingthrush on the Isle of Man, Lady Amherst's Pheasant was never fully 'established.'

2015 Sighting

One was seen in woods near Bedford in 2015, and another was spotted in St Andrews in 2019.

'We thought it had fled captivity,' Sophie continued.

'I contacted the university's bird society, who said a local woman had seen it on occasion but didn't know where it came from.'

'We've been asking where it's been all this time; it's a mystery.'

'We just needed to make sure it was a Lady Amherst's pheasant, so we contacted the British Trust for Ornithology, who agreed it was.

'They said seeing one in the wild was very unusual, and they were fascinated that it had been seen here before.'

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