Pheasant Dreams
The Village of Thua Luu, in the central Vietnamese province of Thua Thien-Hue, is tucked into the narrow coastal strip between the Annamite Mountains and the South China Sea. Just behind the railroad tracks is an imposing French Catholic church with a wrought-iron gate bearing the date of its consecration: 1894.
The missionaries who came to what was then French Indochina were often men of science as well as seekers of souls, and a year after the church was built, Father Jean-Nicolas Renauld found in the hills north of Thua Luu four specimens of a bird no European had seen before. It was a pheasant of striking beauty. The male’s plumage was a shimmering, iridescent blue. It had a shaggy white crest, and its face was bright red, its legs a lighter vermilion. The female was more subdued, though when she caught the light there were subtle shades of chestnut brown and a metallic green sheen to the edge of her wings.
Renauld sent the four skins to the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, where the bird was given its Linnaean name: Gennaeus Edwardsi (later reclassified as Lophura edwardsi), in honor of the museum’s director, Alphonse Milne- Edwards. And that was the last anyone outside of Vietnam saw of the species until the aristocratic French explorer and ornithologist Jean Delacour arrived in Indochina a quarter-century later.
The French in Vietnam were brutal and rapacious, yet also deeply committed to science and scholarship, seeing it as an essential part of their Mission Civilisatrice. In 1922 the governor of what was then the Protectorate of Annam invited Delacour to make the first comprehensive survey of the birds of French Indochina. A man of formidable energy, Delacour would end up making seven expeditions to the remotest parts of present-day Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, capping his discoveries with the monumental four-volume Les Oiseaux de l’Indochine Française, published in 1931.
In the city of Quang Tri, Delacour met Pierre Jabouille, a colonial administrator with a passion for zoology. Jabouille gave Delacour a tour of his small aviary, which included three living Lophura edwardsi. Since childhood, pheasants had been Delacour’s special passion, and he was entranced, he wrote, by the bird’s “glittering blue” beauty.
Jabouille joined Delacour on his expeditions, and together they amassed a collection of 38,000 specimens, mammals as well as birds, including 140 previously undocumented species. In the forests of Thua Thien-Hue and Quang Tri, they collected 64 live Edwards’s Pheasants, suggesting that the bird was not uncommon at the time. Its southernmost stronghold seemed to
