Spotted Puffbird

About the Spotted Puffbird

The spotted puffbird (Bucco tamatia) is a species of puffbird in the family Bucconidae, the puffbirds, nunlets, and nunbirds. It is found in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela.

The spotted puffbird was described in 1648 by the German naturalist Georg Marcgrave in his Historia Naturalis Brasiliae. In his Latin text Marcgrave used the name Tamatia Brasiliensibus where tamatia was the local name for the bird in the Tupi language. Later ornithologists such as Francis Willughby in 1678 and John Ray in 1713 based their own description on that by Marcgrave. In 1780 the French polymath Comte de Buffon described and illustrated Le Tamatia from a specimen that had been collected in Cayenne, French Guiana. When the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin revised and expanded Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae in 1788 he included the spotted puffbird and cited the works by the earlier ornithologists. He placed the species with the other puffbirds in the genus Bucco and coined the binomial name Bucco tamatia.

The spotted puffbird has sometimes been placed in the genus Nystactes. It is closely related to the sooty-capped puffbird... Wikipedia →