Yellow-throated woodpecker

The yellow-throated woodpecker (Piculus flavigula) is a species of bird in the family Picidae, the woodpeckers, piculets, and wrynecks. It is found in northern and central South America in Brazil and the entire Amazon Basin; also in the Guianas, and Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela. Besides the Amazon Basin, it is found in the southeast basin in the adjoining Tocantins-Araguaia River drainage; on the east at the edge of its range there, it only occurs in the headwaters of the Tocantins, then recontinues at the joining of the Araguaia-Tocantins as it goes to the Atlantic Ocean.

Yellow-throated woodpecker
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Piciformes
Family: Picidae
Genus: Piculus
Species:
P. flavigula
Binomial name
Piculus flavigula
(Boddaert, 1783)

Two separated disjunct populations occur in Brazil at the southeast coastal regions (parts of the Caatinga). The largest group extends for 1,500 km; the smaller, only about 200 km. In Venezuela, it is found in the east and southeast and covers most of the Orinoco River drainage.

Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist lowland forest and subtropical or tropical swamps.

Taxonomy

The yellow-throated 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 French Guiana.[2] 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.[3] 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 flavigula in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées.[4] The yellow-throated woodpecker is now placed in the genus Piculus that was introduced by the German naturalist Johann Baptist von Spix in 1824.[5] The generic name is a diminutive of the Latin word Picus meaning "woodpecker". The specific epithet flavigula combines the Latin flavus meaning "yellow" and gula meaning "throat".[6]

Three subspecies are recognised:[7]

  • P. f. flavigula (Boddaert, 1783) – eastern Colombia and southern Venezuela through the Guianas, northern Brazil
  • P. f. magnus (Cherrie & Reichenberger, 1921) – northeastern Ecuador and southeastern Colombia to northern Bolivia, western Brazil
  • P. f. erythropis (Vieillot, 1818) – eastern and southeastern Brazil

References
  1. BirdLife International (2012). "Piculus flavigula". IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. 2012. Retrieved 26 November 2013.CS1 maint: ref=harv (link)
  2. Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc de (1780). "Le petit pic a gorge jaune". Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux (in French). Volume 13. Paris: De L'Imprimerie Royale. p. 56.
  3. Buffon, Georges-Louis Leclerc de; Martinet, François-Nicolas; Daubenton, Edme-Louis; Daubenton, Louis-Jean-Marie (1765–1783). "Pic à gorge jaune, de Cayenne". Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle. Volume 8. Paris: De L'Imprimerie Royale. Plate 784.
  4. Boddaert, Pieter (1783). Table des planches enluminéez d'histoire naturelle de M. D'Aubenton : avec les denominations de M.M. de Buffon, Brisson, Edwards, Linnaeus et Latham, precedé d'une notice des principaux ouvrages zoologiques enluminés (in French). Utrecht. p. 49, Number 784.
  5. von Spix, Johann Baptist (1824). Avium species novae, quas in itinere per Brasiliam annis MDCCCXVII-MDCCCXX (in Latin). Monachii [München]: Typis Franc. Seraph. Hübschmanni. Index p. 3. The link is to a scan of the 2nd edition published in 1838–1839.
  6. Jobling, James A. (2010). The Helm Dictionary of Scientific Bird Names. London: Christopher Helm. pp. 161, 306. ISBN 978-1-4081-2501-4.
  7. Gill, Frank; Donsker, David, eds. (2019). "Woodpeckers". World Bird List Version 9.2. International Ornithologists' Union. Retrieved 6 August 2019.


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