A forest-floor pheasant that probes leaf litter with its long bill. In the lowland form described from Sarawak, males and females differ in breast color and the number of leg spurs.
In the lowland adult form, the male has a chestnut head, grey breast and brown back, with two spurs on each leg. The female is paler and buffier, lacks the grey breast, and has one spur.
Long-billed Partridges inhabit forests in Southeast Asia, including the Malay Peninsula, Sumatra and Borneo. They occur in primary and mature secondary forest. Eggs collected in 1934 preserve an early record of their breeding.
A 1946 account described two eggs obtained from separate nests in western Borneo’s Singkawang region in February 1934. A female caught at one nest was shown to the author. Local reports described a shallow hollow beside bamboo, lined with fibres and dead bamboo leaves.
The elongated eggs had smooth, slightly glossy shells. Their pale ground colour carried chestnut and violet markings, with different spotting patterns on the two specimens. Both measured about 3.7 centimetres long. These details preserve a small but concrete record of the bird’s forest breeding habitat.
IUCN Red List · Near Threatened · Global
The 2025 IUCN global assessment lists Long-billed Partridge as Near Threatened, with a suspected decreasing trend. Logging and conversion to plantations drive forest loss and fragmentation. Proposed actions include protecting currently occupied forest, studying regional habitat requirements and clarifying its contemporary distribution on Sumatra.