Amazonian barred woodcreeper


The Amazonian barred woodcreeper is a species of bird in the Dendrocolaptinae subfamily, the woodcreepers. The northern barred woodcreeper was formerly included in this species. The Amazonian barred woodcreeper still includes the subspecies concolor, which sometimes is considered a separate species, the concolor woodcreeper.
It is found in the entire Amazon Basin of Brazil and the Guianas in the northeast,. The countries surrounding the basin at the Andes are southern Colombia and Venezuela, also Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. A disjunct population exists 1800 km east of the Amazon Basin in eastern coastal Brazil in the states of Paraíba, Pernambuco, Alagoas, and Sergipe in a 600 km coastal strip. Its natural habitat is subtropical or tropical moist lowland forests.

Taxonomy

The Amazonian barred woodcreeper was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from two specimens collected in Cayenne, French Guiana. The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Picus certhia in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The Amazonian barred woodcreeper is now one of five woodcreepers placed in the genus Dendrocolaptes that was introduced by the French naturalist Johann Hermann in 1804. The generic name is from the Ancient Greek dendrokolaptēs meaning "woodpecker". The specific epithet certhia is from the Ancient Greek kerthios, a word used by Aristotle for an unidentified small insectivorous bird.
Seven subspecies are recognised: