Red-necked woodpecker
The red-necked woodpecker is a species of bird in the family Picidae.
It is found in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela.
Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist lowland forest and subtropical or tropical moist montane forest.Taxonomy
The red-necked woodpecker was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen 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 rubricollis in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The red-necked woodpecker is now placed in the genus Campephilus that was introduced by the English zoologist George Robert Gray in 1840. The genus name combines the Ancient Greek kampē meaning "caterpillar" and philos meaning "loving". The specific epithet rubricollis combines the Latin ruber meaning "red" with -collis meaning "-necked".
Three subspecies are recognised:
- C. r. rubricollis – east Colombia and east Ecuador through south Venezuela, the Guianas and north Brazil
- C. r. trachelopyrus – east Peru, north Bolivia and west Brazil
- C. r. olallae – central and southwest Brazil to central Bolivia
