Chestnut-quilled Rock-Pigeon

About the Chestnut-quilled Rock-Pigeon

The chestnut-quilled rock pigeon (Petrophassa rufipennis) is a dark sooty brown pigeon with a distinctive bright chestnut patch on its wing visible in flight. It has distinctive pale lines across its face curving above and below its eye. A species of bird in the family Columbidae, it is very similar in behaviour and habitat to the white-quilled rock pigeon but it is only found on rocky escarpments in western Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory of Australia.

The chestnut-quilled rock pigeon was observed by the German naturalist Ludwig Leichhardt near the head of the South Alligator River in the Northern Territory of Australia, on 11 November 1845 while on a journey to Port Essington but no specimen was collected. The species was formally described and illustrated in 1898 by the Norwegian naturalist Robert Collett based on a specimen that had been collected from the same locality by the explorer Knut Dahl. Collett coined the binomial name Petrophassa rufipennis.

The common name rock-pigeon is a reference to the association of the genus to tropical sandstone escarpments. The genus name derives from Greek words: petros meaning rock (its preferred habitat... Wikipedia →