Datel červenočerný / Red-necked Woodpeckers by Jan Dungel

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:   

http://www.jandungel.com

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.