Like all other jacanas, they have elongated toes and nails that enable them to walk on floating vegetation in shallow lakes, their preferred habitat.

They are found in tropical Asia from Yemen in the west to the Philippines in the east and move seasonally in parts of their range.

In the non-breeding season the top of the head and back are dark brown and only a trace of the golden nape feathers may be seen.

Some traces of the black stripe on the side of the neck and white wings separate them from somewhat similar looking immatures of the bronze-winged jacana.

[6][7][8] Shufeldt described the skeletal features of a specimen from Luzon as being typical of jacanas except that the skull resembles in some ways those of sandpipers.

The skull and mandibles are slightly pneumatized, unlike the other bones, and the sternum has a notch on the side which serve as attachment points to long and slender xiphoidal processes.

He described a bird with the long toes and the elongated feather extensions resembling the lancets used for blood-letting by surgeons of the period.

[10][11] Based on this description, the bird was given a binomial by Giovanni Scopoli in 1787 in his Deliciae Florae et Faunae Insubricae (Pars II), where he placed it in the genus Tringa.

[13] The genus Hydrophasianus, meaning "water pheasant", was erected by Johann Georg Wagler in 1832 as the species was distinctive in having a slender bill, lacking any frontal lappet, having a shorter hind claw than Metopidius, bearing on the outer two primaries lanceolate elongations, and having a pointed fourth primary.

Body mass measurements can vary widely based on physiological conditions and are generally not used for taxonomic purposes.

Birds disperse in summer and have been recorded as vagrants in Socotra,[19] Qatar,[20] Australia and southern Japan (mainly Okinawa, Yonaguni, Ishigaki and Iriomote).

[21][7][22] The pheasant-tailed jacana's main sources of food are insects, molluscs, and other invertebrates picked from floating vegetation or the water's surface.

The female builds a nest on floating vegetation made of leaves and stalks of plants with a depression in the centre.

[24] The downy nidifugous chicks freeze when threatened or when the male indicates alarm and may lie partly submerged with just the bill out of water.

[28] The trematode parasite Renicola philippinensis was described from the kidney of a pheasant-tailed jacana in the New York Zoological Garden[32] while Cycloceolum brasilianum was recorded in India.

[35] The pheasant-tailed jacana is commonly distributed in lily ponds in Sri Lanka and on account of its mewing call is known as the "cat teal" or juana in Sinhalese.