Mrs. Hume's pheasant
species of bird
Mrs Hume's pheasant (Syrmaticus humiae) (Meitei: Nongin; literally, "one who follows the track of rain", Mizo: Vavu), also known as Hume's pheasant or the bar-tailed pheasant, is a large forest pheasant. It is the state bird of Mizoram and Manipur. The name commemorates Mary Ann Grindall Hume, wife of the British naturalist Allan Octavian Hume, one of the key founders of the Indian National Congress.
Description
The pheasant is up to 90 cm (35 in) long with a greyish brown head, bare red facial skin, chestnut brown plumage, yellowish bill, brownish orange iris, white wingbars and metallic blue neck feathers. The male has a long greyish white, barred black and brown tail. The female is a chestnut brown bird with whitish throat, buff colour belly and white-tipped tail.
Taxonomy
Mrs Hume's pheasant's has two recognised subspecies,
Syrmaticus humiae humiae (Hume, 1881) - mountains of extreme northeast India (Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram, and Nagaland), and east to the Irrawaddy River in northwestern Myanmar.
Syrmaticus humiae burmanicus (Oates, 1898) - South China (southwestern Yunnan, western Guangxi, and extreme southwestern Guizhou) and eastern Myanmar (east of Irrawaddy river) south to northwestern Thailand.
Distribution and population
This rare and little known pheasant is found throughout forested habitats of Mizoram, Patkai Range, Manipur, Yunnan and northern parts of Myanmar and Thailand. Its diet consists mainly of vegetation matter.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Mrs. Hume's pheasant” as species of bird. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the science & nature register because the source frames it as species of bird. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The date and method of observation matter as much as the stated conclusion, especially where classification or consensus has changed. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q852185. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1881 and 1898.
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This entry incorporates text from “Mrs. Hume's pheasant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.