Green-barred Woodpecker

About the Green-barred Woodpecker

The green-barred woodpecker or green-barred flicker (Colaptes melanochloros) is a species of bird in subfamily Picinae of the woodpecker family Picidae. It is found in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. The green-barred woodpecker was formally described in 1788 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with woodpeckers in the genus Picus and coined the binomial name Picus melanochloros. The specific epithet melanochloros combines the Ancient Greek melas meaning "black" with khlōros meaning "green" or "yellow". Gmelin based his description on "Le grand pic rayé de Cayenne" that had been described and illustrated in 1760 by the French polymath Comte de Buffon. Buffon mistakenly believed that his specimen had been collected in Cayenne, French Guiana but the species does not occur there. Instead, the type locality has been designated as Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

The green-barred woodpecker was moved to the genus Chrysoptilus, but this genus has been merged into Colaptes based on the results of a 2011 molecular phylogenetic study. The American Ornithological... Wikipedia →