Beautiful Fruit-dove

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Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Aves
Order:	Columbiformes
Family:	Columbidae
Genus:	Ptilinopus
Species:	P. pulchellus

Binomial name

Ptilinopus pulchellus
(Temminck, 1835)

The Beautiful Fruit-dove, Ptilinopus pulchellus also known as Crimson-capped Fruit-dove or Rose-fronted Pigeon is a small, up to 19cm long, green fruit dove. It has a red crown, whitish throat, an olive-green bill and purplish feet. It has a grey breast and yellowish orange belly, with a reddish purple patch in between. Both sexes are similar.

The Beautiful Fruit-dove is distributed in rainforests of New Guinea and the islands of Batanta, Waigeo, Salawati and Misool in West Papua, Indonesia. The female usually lays a single white egg.

Its diet consists mainly of various fruits, palms and vines. In the Port Moresby area, birds were found to eat a mixed diet in May. Large Tristiropsis canarioides fruit were taken when available, but the species gets displaced from fruiting trees by larger pigeons such as Ducula mullerii. Small Endiandra sp. fruit were very often eaten, but made up only a small quantity of food volume. Other food were Gymnacranthera paniculata and small quantities of Polyalthia sp., Livistona palm fruit, and occasionally pepper (Piper) berries. Despite their small size, they are able to swallow fruits of 5cm³ volume, which would translate into a diameter of about 2cm in spherical fruit.(Frith et al. 1976)

Widespread and common throughout its large range, the Beautiful Fruit-dove is evaluated as Least Concern on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species.

[edit] References

BirdLife International (2004). Ptilinopus pulchellus. 2006 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. IUCN 2006. Retrieved on 18 November 2006. Database entry includes justification for why this species is of least concern
Frith, H.J.; Rome, F.H.J.C. & Wolfe, T.O. (1976): Food of fruit-pigeons in New Guinea. Emu 76(2): 49-58. HTML abstract