Diet and Foraging

One of the most common canopy frugivores in many parts of its range, this species remains understudied in many aspects of its life-history.

Microhabitat for Foraging

Primarily a bird of the canopy, the Blue-throated Barbet sometimes descends lower in search of fruit (1 Short, L. L., and J. F. M. Horne (2001) Toucans, Barbets and Honeyguides. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. Close ).

Food Capture and Consumption

It tends to gather at fruiting trees and is not a shy bird. Some captive specimens swallow dates whole (35 Norris, K. A. (1950). Some notes on barbets. The Avicultural Magazine 56:135-137. Close ). Fruit are removed using the large bill, but are also sometimes eaten by removing pieces when still attached to the tree (AK). Insects may be captured perched, or rarely in flight (AK), as with other barbets (1 Short, L. L., and J. F. M. Horne (2001) Toucans, Barbets and Honeyguides. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. Close ). The bird bashes large insects against a tree limb before consuming them (1 Short, L. L., and J. F. M. Horne (2001) Toucans, Barbets and Honeyguides. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. Close ).

Diet includes fruits of Ficus such as Ficus glomerata, Dillenia pulcherrima [= D. aurea] (28 Stanford, J. K. (1935). Notes on the birds of the Sittang-Irrawaddy plain, lower Burma. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 37(4):859–889. Close ), Celtis australis (36 Narang, M. L., R. S. Rana, and M. Prabhakar (2000). Avian species involved in pollination and seed dispersal of some forestry species in Himachal Pradesh. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society 97:215-222. Close ) and Ilex umbellulata (37 Sourav, M. S. H. (2016). An avian feeding guild exploits the fruit of Ilex umbellulata at Kaptai National Park, Bangladesh. BirdingASIA 25:54-57. Close ), as well as Ficus drupacea, Talauma hodgsoni [= Magnolia hodgsonii], Litsea sp. and Sterculia villosa (33 Velho, N, J. Ratnam, U. Srinivasan, and M. Sankaran (2012). Shifts in community structure of tropical trees and avian frugivores in forests recovering from past logging. Biological Conservation 153:32–40. Close ), flowers of Pistacia integerrima, Butea monosperma and Erythrina variegata (38 Chowdhury, S. U. (2021). Assemblage of birds at an Indian Coral Tree Erythrina variegata in Bangladesh. BirdingASIA 35:106–110. Close ), and various insect larvae, crickets, mantids and large centipedes (1 Short, L. L., and J. F. M. Horne (2001) Toucans, Barbets and Honeyguides. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK. Close ).

Captive wild-caught or hand-reared juveniles of the Blue-throated Barbet from the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in Chine tend to exhibit a preference for black and red fruits over yellow, green or blue fruits in a choice experiment, possibly because of contrast against the green canopy background (39 Duan, Q., E. Goodale, and R. Quan (2014). Bird fruit preferences match the frequency of fruit colours in tropical Asia. Scientific Reports 4:5627. Close ).

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