Ringed Woodpecker

About the Ringed Woodpecker

The ringed woodpecker (Celeus torquatus) is a species of bird in subfamily Picinae of the woodpecker family Picidae. It is found in every mainland South American country except Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay. The ringed 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-colored 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 torquatus in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. Early in the 20th century the ringed woodpecker was placed in its own genus Cerchneipicus. By the middle of the century Cerchneipicus had been merged into its current genus Celeus that was introduced by the German zoologist Friedrich Boie in 1831. The generic name is from the Ancient Greek word keleos for... Wikipedia →