Blond-crested Woodpecker

About the Blond-crested Woodpecker

The blond-crested woodpecker (Celeus flavescens) is a species of bird in the woodpecker family Picidae. It is found in Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay. The blond-crested 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 the other woodpeckers in the genus Picus and coined the binomial name Picus flavescens. The specific epithet flavescens is Latin meaning "golden-yellowish". Gmelin based his description on the "yellow-crested woodpecker" from Brazil that had been described and illustrated in 1776 by the English naturalist Peter Brown. Thomas Pennant had provided Brown with a drawing of the bird. The blond-crested woodpecker is now one of 13 species placed in the genus Celeus that was introduced in 1831 by Friedrich Boie.

The blond-crested woodpecker has two subspecies, the nominate C. f. flavescens (Gmelin, JF, 1788) and C. f. intercedens (Hellmayr 1908). What is now the ochre-backed woodpecker (C. ochraceus) was previously included as a third subspecies.

The blond-crested woodpecker is about 27 to 30 cm (11... Wikipedia →