Critically Endangered
Sulu Bleeding-heart
Gallicolumba menagei
Sulu Bleeding-heart is a pigeon in the family Columbidae (order Columbiformes) — Gallicolumba menagei, recorded as Critically Endangered.
Appearance
Bright metallic green feathers stretch from the forehead and crown down to the mantle and sides of the breast. The scapular feathers are a dark chestnut color and are fringed with iridescence that can appear violet, green, or lilac in different lights. The wing-coverts are also a dark brown, with some of the feathers being ashy-gray at the tip to form a slight wingbar.
The bleeding-heart is between 25 and 27 cm (9.8 and 10.6 in) long, and the weight is unknown.
Range and habitat
The Sulu bleeding-heart is endemic to the island of Tawi-Tawi and its nearby islets in the southwestern part of the Philippines's Sulu Archipelago. The bleeding-heart is believed to be extirpated on the Tawi-Tawi mainland, but there are indigenous reports of the species on the nearby islets of Tandubatu, Dundangan, and Baliungan. There is also an unconfirmed nineteenth-century sight record of the species from the island of Jolo in the center of the Sulu Archipelago.
It is endemic to the island of Tawi-Tawi and its surrounding islets in the Philippines' Sulu Archipelago.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
It only perches in trees in order to roost or mate.
In crisis
This species is known only from two specimens collected in 1891, and has not been recorded with certainty since. For this reason, it is currently listed as critically endangered by the IUCN. Any surviving population would be very small, likely numbering fewer than 50 individuals, and would be threatened by habitat destruction and uncontrolled hunting.
Sulu Bleeding-heart is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Sulu Bleeding-heart, Wikidata item Q478111. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
