Pheasant and grouse prints

Daniel Giraud Elliot counted no family of birds more important to people than the pheasants, ‘the original source of all the domestic poultry’, and his monograph takes the family wide: peafowl, argus pheasants, monals, tragopans, the jungle-fowl behind the farmyard hen, turkeys and guinea-fowl, each in its own landscape. He dedicated it to Joseph Wolf. Look for the Himalayan Monal Pheasant and the Ocellated Turkey, both drawn by Wolf and put on stone by Keulemans. In the earlier Family of the Grouse, mostly drawn by Wolf, Elliot wanted to record the grouse while they could still be seen in the wild; many, he wrote, were ‘rapidly disappearing from our land’.

The Wild Turkey appears twice: in Elliot’s pheasants, and life size as plate 1 of Audubon’s book. John Gould adds the tragopans of his first book, A Century of Birds from the Himalaya Mountains, drawn on stone by his wife Elizabeth, and the pheasants, monals and snow partridges of The Birds of Asia.