Red-necked Woodpecker

About the Red-necked Woodpecker

The red-necked woodpecker (Campephilus rubricollis) 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 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-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 rubricollis in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The red-necked woodpecker was for a time placed in genus Scapaneus that was later merged into genus Phloeoceastes. The latter was itself merged into the current genus Campephilus that was introduced by the English zoologist George Robert Gray in 1840. The genus name combines the Ancient Greek... Wikipedia →