Jambu Fruit-Dove

About the Jambu Fruit-Dove

The jambu fruit dove (Ramphiculus jambu) is a smallish colourful fruit dove. It is a resident breeding species in southern Thailand, Malaysia, Brunei and the Indonesian islands of Kalimantan, Sumatra and Java. This species was formerly placed in the genus Ptilinopus.

The jambu fruit dove was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with all the other doves and pigeons in the genus Columba and coined the binomial name Columba jambu. Gmelin gave the locality as Java, he based his description on the "pooni-jamboo" that had been first described in 1783 by the Irish orientalist William Marsden in his book The History of Sumatra. Punai jambu is the Malay name for the species which William wrote comes from the colour of its head which is similar to the flower of the Malay rose apple (Eugenia malaccense) tree or known to him later as jambu merah; this word jambu was used as the bird's specific epithet. The species is monotypic: no subspecies are recognised.

The jambu fruit dove was formerly placed in the genus Ptilinopus. A molecular genetic study published... Wikipedia →