Spot-breasted Woodpecker

About the Spot-breasted Woodpecker

The spot-breasted woodpecker or spot-breasted flicker (Colaptes punctigula) is a species of bird in subfamily Picinae of the woodpecker family Picidae. It is found in Panama and every mainland South American country except Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay.

The spot-breasted 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 punctigula in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. For many years, the spot-breasted woodpecker was placed in the genus Chrysoptilus, but it is now placed in the genus Colaptes that was introduced by the Irish zoologist Nicholas Aylward Vigors in 1825. The generic name is from the Ancient Greek kolaptēs... Wikipedia →