Yellow-tufted Woodpecker

About the Yellow-tufted Woodpecker

The yellow-tufted woodpecker (Melanerpes cruentatus) is a species of woodpecker. It is found in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela. Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist lowland forests and heavily degraded former forest.

The yellow-tufted 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 cruentatus in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The yellow-tufted woodpecker is now placed in the genus Melanerpes that was introduced by the English ornithologist William Swainson in 1832. The species is monotypic. The generic name combines the Ancient Greek melas meaning "black" with herpēs... Wikipedia →