Beautiful Fruit Doves aka Rose-fronted Pigeons

The Beautiful Fruit Doves (Ptilinopus pulchellus), is also known as the Rose-fronted Pigeon or Crimson-capped Fruit Dove (leading to easy confusion with the Crimson-crowned Fruit Dove).

Description

It is a small, approximately 19 cm (7½ in) long, mainly green fruit dove. It has a red crown, a whitish throat, a greenish-yellow bill, and purplish-red feet. It has a blue-grey breast and yellowish-orange belly, with a reddish-purple patch in between. Males and females look alike.

Beautiful Fruit Dove (Ptilinopus pulchellus)

Distribution / Range

The Beautiful Fruit Doves are distributed in the rainforests of New Guinea and the islands of Batanta, Waigeo, Salawati, and Misool in West Papua, Indonesia.

Further Dove Information

Diet / Feeding

Its diet consists mainly of various fruits from trees, 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 the Collared Imperial-pigeon (Ducula mullerii).

Small Endiandra sp. fruit was very often eaten but made up only a small quantity of food volume.

Other foods were Gymnacranthera paniculata and small quantities of Polyalthia sp., Livistona palm fruit, and occasionally pepper (Piper) berries.

Despite their small size, they can swallow fruits of 5 cm³ volume, which would translate into a diameter of about 2 cm in spherical fruit. (Frith et al. 1976)

Breeding / Nesting

The female usually lays a single white egg.

Status

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

 
 
 
Photo of author

Gordon Ramel

Gordon is an ecologist with two degrees from Exeter University. He's also a teacher, a poet and the owner of 1,152 books. Oh - and he wrote this website.

We love to hear from our readers. If you have any questions or if you want to get in touch with us, you can find our contact details on our About Us page.

Leave a Comment