The many-coloured fruit dove (Ptilinopus perousii), also known as manuma in the Samoan language, is a species of bird in the family Columbidae. It occurs on islands in the south-west Pacific Ocean where it is found in Fiji, the Samoan Islands, and Tonga. Its natural habitat is subtropical or tropical moist lowland forests. Today, the birds are most often found in Fiji and Tonga. It usually feeds high in the canopy on fruit and berries, especially banyan fig. The nest is a small platform of twigs where one white egg is laid.
Description
It is a small dove, in length. Adults weigh about . The male is mostly pale yellow-white with a red crown and red bar across the back. The female is mostly green, darker on the back and greyer on the head and breast. Her crown is red while the undertail-coverts are red in Samoan birds and yellow in birds from Fiji and Tonga.
Male Ptilinopus perousii perousii is pale on the bottom and yellow on top. There is also a crimson band and corona. The female is said to resemble the purple-capped fruit dove; however, there is no yellow band. They have grey on the bottom while green on top. It only has a crimson corona unlike the male.
Distribution and habitat
Manuma are found across many islands and archipelagos across Polynesia with a range of . They can be found in lowland subtropical and tropical broadleaf forests. In these forests, they are found in the canopies. They can also be found in urban areas. The manuma's fossil range is from 0.12 million years ago to today, exclusively in the quaternary.
Behaviour and ecology
Diet The many-coloured fruit dove is a frugivore. It forages the canopies of trees in search of figs. On Samoa and American Samoa it is mostly the banyan. This strict diet keeps the two fig species in check; however, any decline in the amount of figs may be a disaster for the many-coloured fruit dove. On Fiji and Tonga, many-coloured fruit doves are known to eat the fruit of ylang ylang (Cananga odorata), bishop wood (Bischofia javanica), and (Trema cannabina).
Social Many-coloured fruit doves are often found in small flocks. In each flock there are normally more males than females.
Taxonomy The many-coloured fruit dove is in the columbid family with the other doves and pigeons. It a fruit dove belonging to genus Ptilinopus. However, it is very far from most other doves and has no close relatives due to it being endemic to the South Pacific islands.
Etymology Its English name is literal; it is a many-coloured dove that eats fruit. The Samoan name manuma means shy bird and comes from the Samoan words for bird and shame. The Latin name comes from Captain Jean Francois de Galaup Comte de la Pérouse of the French navy, who explored the Pacific.
Subspecies The two subspecies are Ptilinopus perousii mariae and P. p. perousii. Nominate P. p. perousii is found on Samoa (Savai'i, Upolu, Tutuila, Ofu, and Tau), and subspecies P. p. mariae is found in Fiji and Tonga.
Description to Western Science The Many-coloured fruit dove is unusual taxonomically because its first encounter with Western naturalists happened decades before its formal scientific description. Additionally, the bird already had a name, a place in Samoan society, and a cultural meaning for the Indigenous people of the Samoan Islands long before an American naturalist gave it a Latin name. Anthropologist Serge Tcherkézoff identifies the bird encountered by the French in 1787 as the Samoan manumā, later named Ptilinopus perousii by the naturalist of the United States Exploring Expedition.
La Pérouse Expedition (c.1787) In December 1787, the French explorer Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, arrived in the Samoan Islands. La Pérouse commanded the French expedition aboard the frigate La Boussole, accompanied by L'Astrolabe, which was commanded by Paul-Antoine Fleuriot de Langle.
King Louis XVI had commissioned the expedition in 1785 as a voyage of scientific discovery around the world. Inspired by the expeditions of men like James Cook and the general sensibilities of the Age of Scientific Exploration, La Pérouse's expedition carried scientists and artists and was equipped with scientific instruments and a library of reference works. Its scientists were expected to study the geography and natural history of the new places they discovered, and were also expected to carefully record the people they encountered and their observed customs.
This was a time in broader Western European cultures-- immediately following the Age of Discovery and the Age of Enlightenment-- when studies of biology, anthropology, geography, and taxonomy were all classified as the generalised "natural history". Because of this grouping of studies, La Pérouse's instructions from the French Government specifically directed him to observe the inhabitants of the places he visited, to interact with them as much as possible, and to collect and classify objects used by the people he encountered.
The expedition's brief stop at Samoa was complicated. The expedition arrived in what they called the Navigator Islands on December 6th, 1787. They stopped at an island they called Maouna on the same day, and made contact with the indigenous Samoans almost immediately. On December 11th, 1787, shortly before the expedition planned to depart from Samoa, a party commanded by de Langle went ashore in search of fresh water. A violent confrontation followed, and de Langle, Robert de Lamanon, and 10 other members of the expedition were killed at Massacre Bay. Before this violence, however, the French explorers had recorded peaceful exchanges with Samoans. La Pérouse's posthumously-published account describes Samoan canoes approaching the ships and bringing provisions and other objects for exchange.
Among the objects the Samoans brought aboard was something that fascinated La Pérouse: a remarkably colourful and tame little dove. His published account describes it as an "exceptionally charming turtle dove" that was "tame enough to eat from a person's hand and even from the mouth". La Pérouse's detailed description was compared with the known characteristics of Ptilinopus perousii and modern anthropologists and historians have identified the dove as the Samoan manumā, also known in historical sources by other names.
To La Pérouse, a French naturalist, the dove was a remarkable and unique specimen. To the Samoans who presented it, it appears to have carried a different significance. Anthropologists believe that the manumā was associated with high chiefs and was kept as a special or sacred pet rather than being treated as food.
La Pérouse himself did not give the bird the scientific name Ptilinopus perousii. That came roughly half a century later, when American naturalist Titian Ramsay Peale described the species as part of the United States Exploring Expedition.
United States Exploring Expedition (c. 1839)
The United States Exploring Expedition reached the Samoan Islands in October 1839. Authorised by an act of Congress in 1836, the expedition was commanded by Lieutenant Charles Wilkes of the United States Navy. The expedition was intended to survey and explore the Pacific Ocean and South Seas, a region that was becoming increasingly important to American traders and whalers.Chapman, Bert. Initial Visions of Paradise: Antebellum U.S. Government Initial Visions of Paradise: Antebellum U.S. Government Documents on the South Pacific Documents on the South Pacific. Purdue University, Purdue University E-Publications. Published October 2004. Accessed 19 September 2026. Online PDF Its scientific corps included Peale and another naturalist Charles Pickering, conchologist Joseph Pitty Couthouy, mineralogist James Dwight Dana, botanists William Rich and William Dunlop Brackenridge, and linguist Horatio Hale. Artists Joseph Drayton and Alfred Thomas Agate also accompanied the expedition.
By the time of the United States Exploring Expedition, natural history had become an increasingly systematic field of study. The expedition's scientists collected specimens, artifacts, and observations throughout the voyage, and the material was later organised into scientific publications and museum collections. Peale was particularly well suited to this work: he has been described as an experienced field naturalist, taxidermist, illustrator, and collector. During the expedition, he collected thousands of specimens, including 2,150 birds, and produced numerous drawings and paintings. Peale also produced the original drawing that became the basis for the bird's published illustration.
One of the birds collected during the expedition was the many-coloured fruit dove. The Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History's birds division of Vertebrate Zoology identifies the original type specimen as an adult male collected on Upolu, Samoa, under the expedition field number 551. The specimen is now catalogued as Smithsonian USNM Number A14828. The catalogue identifies "Upolu" as the restricted type locality and notes that this was the only specimen of the original series from that locality.
Formal Description (c.1849) Modern taxonomic authorities cite the species as Ptilinopus perousii (Peale, TR, 1849)
The formal name appeared in Peale's 1849 report on the mammals and birds of the United States Exploring Expedition as Ptilinopus perousii. However, the volume itself bears the date 1848, which is why some references give 1848 as its imprint year.
The name perousii was chosen in reference to La Pérouse. The two European-American expeditions to Samoa were not affiliated, but accounts of La Pérouse's voyage had entered the published literature long before the United States Exploring Expedition set sail.
After La Pérouse and his expedition vanished into the Pacific Ocean in 1788, The National Assembly formally ordered that all his remaining documentation of the expedition should be collected, compiled, and published at public expense as a record of the lost expedition. The account of the expedition, edited together by Louis Marie de Milet de Mureau, was submitted to the National Assembly on 22 April, 1791. The French government published Voyage de La Pérouse autour du monde in 1791, based on the La Pérouse's expedition's surviving records, and the work was subsequently reprinted and translated into several languages. It was also published in English under the title A Voyage Round the World- In The Years 1785, 1786, 1787 and 1788. La Pérouse's entire journey was told in three volumes to English-readers (Volume I, Volume II, and Volume III), which were publicly available by 1798.
While the surviving scholarship does not provide a separate document showing exactly when Peale first read La Pérouse's account or when he decided personally to use the name, it was considered fairly expected that 19th-century naturalists would be familiar with the previous European explorers that had visited the locations before them, and naming species in their honor was not uncommon. Charles Darwin, for example, had access to Voyage de La Pérouse autour du monde while aboard the HMS Beagle.
Peale also produced the original drawing that became the basis for the bird's published illustration. In 1858, John Cassin prepared the ornithological volume of the expedition's publication, and New York engraver Robert Hinshelwood produced a copper printing plate from Peale's drawing. The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History preserves that original plate. In the plate, the bird is identified as "Ptilonopus perousei", the historical spelling used at the time. The plate was published as Plate No. 33 in Volume VIII, Mammalogy and Ornithology, in 1858, produced by Philadelphian printers J. B. Lippincott & Co.
Indigenous Names and Traditional Uses