A search has been launched for a little-known South East Asian species of pheasant, which could be in danger of disappearing for good.
Edwards’s Pheasant is endemic to the lowland forests of central Vietnam, which have been severely depleted by over-exploitation.
A lack of recent records means there is now serious cause for concern about the species’ survival. Edwards’s Pheasant was first described in 1896 but was virtually unknown until the 1920s, and was only ever recorded from a few sites within a restricted range. Between 1930 and 1996 the species was assumed to be extinct, but surveys in the late 1990s suggested that the species survived in several sites in Quang Tri and Quang Binh Provinces in Vietnam.
Since 2000, however, there have been no confirmed records of the species.
In early 2011, the World Pheasant Association (WPA) received funding from the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund for a survey of forests in the Quang Binh and Quang Tri Provinces of central Vietnam to see whether any populations of Edwards’s Pheasant could be found.
In April 2011 a team from WPA, including Research Associates from King Mongkut's University of Technology Thonburi, Thailand, initiated a camera-trap survey in the minimally disturbed Khe Nuoc Trong Watershed Protection Forest, Quang Binh — about 18,000 hectares in total.
The site was identified as being the most likely area for Edwards’s Pheasant on the basis of historical records nearby, and the remoteness of the forest. Logging was stopped in the area in 1992, but the official status of nature reserve is still pending.
The first phase of the survey is now complete, but although 26 species of birds and mammals have been photographed, the Edwards’s Pheasant remains elusive.
There was some encouraging news, though, as local inhabitants claimed to have encountered the species recently in the forest.
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