Cabot's Tragopan is a pheasant relative whose male has inflatable blue and red ornaments on its throat and head. Females look quite different. The species lives in mountain forests of southeastern China and eats plant foods.
The male has a reddish-brown back with pale spots and inflatable blue and red ornaments on the head and throat. The female is smaller, mostly brown, and marked with small white patterns.
Cabot’s Tragopans nest on tree platforms such as forks, accumulated branches and leaves, or abandoned nests. In southeastern China, they have also used bamboo baskets fixed to trees as nesting sites.
At Wuyanling Nature Reserve in Zhejiang, researchers installed 200 baskets, each 30 centimetres across and 15 centimetres deep, in 2002. They distributed them among conifer, broadleaf and mixed forest. Tragopans used 16 that year and 12 after platforms were repaired and added the following year.
Used baskets were disproportionately in mixed conifer–broadleaf forest and upper slopes. Both the platform and its surrounding forest were therefore associated with nest-site choice in this trial.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
The study highlights the importance of forest containing suitable nest platforms. Bamboo baskets were proposed for further trials as a way to supplement nesting sites. Their use was documented, while effects on breeding output and population size remained to be tested.