Originally posted 7/5/2011 - backdated to organize posts by topic.
Illustrations © Jan Dungel
I have been painting wild animals in their natural habitats of South American tropics since 1992. All the drawings were made upon the closest encounters with these animals. Many of them I meet repeatedly at the same spot and thus I have been knowing them”personally” for several years.....
I've long admired this beautiful illustration of a pair of Red-necked Woodpeckers that you can find with an ample array of work by Jan Dungel, a Czech painter, graphic artist and illustrator at:
The artist sent me a few words about his experience with these birds, and woodpeckers in general, in the Amazon Rain Forest as follows:
Woodpeckers are surprisingly common birds throughout the whole Amazonia. They are very similar to their allies in the temperate zone in their manners and habits, usually noisy and conspicuous – in fact one of the most visible rainforest birds of all. I meet them daily both in the lower part of the forest as well as in the dense canopy. There are many species, some are small (
Veniliornis and
Piculus sp) the others large (
Campephilus sp).
I observed and painted this pair of Red-necked Woodpeckers (
Campephilus rubricollis) flying from one tree trunk to another in the upper Orinoco in Venezuela some six years ago. The red-necked "carpintero" is very distinct among the rainforest woodpeckers for its uniformly red belly, unmistakable while the other large woodpeckers of the same [and another] genus are very similar in their black and red coloration and quite difficult to determine especially when foraging high in the trees.
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The Campo Flickers depicted above typically inhabit open and semi-open habitat, like savannas and pampas, in South America.
