Illustration of male Red-necked and Robust Woodpeckers by George F. Sandström

Illustration by George F. Sandström, © Delaware Museum of Natural History

Continuing with the 5th entry in this series, here is a beautiful illustration by George F. Sandström which appears on Plate 80 of Woodpeckers of the World by Lester L. Short, published by the Delaware Museum of Natural History (1982). The bird at the upper portion of the illustration is a male Red-necked Woodpecker and a male Robust Woodpecker appears below.

You can find a detailed profile that I authored of the Red-necked Woodpecker at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Birds of the World site at this link:

Red-necked Woodpecker

 This illustration is posted here pursuant to permission obtained from the publisher.

Red-necked Woodpecker Species Account

pica-pau-de-barriga-vermelha femea, a photo by vhobusfoto on Flickr. 

I recently authored a detailed species account on the Red-necked Woodpecker at Neotropical Birds Online (NBO).  It begins: 

The Red-necked Woodpecker is a large, spectacular Campephilus woodpecker of the rainforest.

 It is fairly common in Colombia and Venezuela and across the Guianas, and south through

 Amazonia to northern Bolivia.  

Each species account in NBO includes information on the identification, distribution, life history, conservation, and research references for a particular bird along with image and sound files for that species.  Visit NBO to read more about profiled Neotropical bird species and to see how you may contribute to authoring or enhancing additional species accounts!

Red-necked Woodpecker species account at Neotropical Birds Online

The superb photo you see here is a female Red-necked Woodpecker near Matto Grasso, Brazil.  It is posted here with permission of talented wildlife photographer Valdir Hobus. 

See more of V. Hobus' fine photography here

Listen at Xeno-Canto

Xeno-canto is a community database of shared bird sounds from around the world.  It's an ever-growing collection of bird sounds.  At xeno-canto, you can listen to dozens of Campephilus woodpecker vocalizations, drumming and knocks from 9 out of the 12 species.  Missing are any sounds of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker, the Cuban Ivory-billed Woodpecker and the Imperial Woodpecker.  That still leaves a multitude of recordings of the rest of the Campephilus family for your enjoyment and study

http://www.xeno-canto.org/browse.php?query=campephilus

Xeno-canto lets visitors to its site participate by discussing and identifying unknown sounds.  And, if you record bird sounds, you should know that xeno-canto also lets people upload and share their own recordings on the site.

Also, don't miss the highly informative Species Overview  pages on Xeno-Canto.  Available from the left frame menu, these pages offer a summary of number of species sound recordings, photos, range maps and sonogram images.   See this page, for example:

Species Overview page for the Red-necked Woodpecker

WikiAves - A Enciclopédia das Aves do Brasil

WikiAves Encyclopedia of Brazilian Birds is an amazing resource of Campephilus descriptive information, photos and sounds.   WikiAves represents the four species of Campephilus woodpeckers, listed below, that can be found in Brazil.

The photographs that I have seen in WikiAves are among the most spectacular ones that I've seen anywhere.

In English and Portuguese, the four species of Campephilus in WikiAves are:

• Cream-backed Woodpecker         Pica-pau-de-barriga-preta

• Crimson-crested Woodpecker      Pica-pau-de-topete-vermelho
  

• Red-necked Woodpecker             Pica-pau-de-barriga-vermelha 

• Robust Woodpecker                    Pica-pau-rei
  

   

Although the entry on the Cream-backed Woodpecker is rather slim (as of this posting) the others have a wealth of descriptive information.  And you'll find sounds and photos for all of them.  You can cut and paste the Portuguese text into your favorite web-based translator to understand the entries.

Crimson-crested Woodpecker in French Guiana

Originally posted 1/31/11 - backdated to organize posts by topic.

Campephilus melanoleucos, originally uploaded by mazama973.

Here's a nice photo of a female Crimson-crested Woodpecker taken in northeast French Guiana by Michel Giraud-Audine and posted here with permission. French Guiana lies north of Brazil and east of Suriname on the northeast coast of South America. The Red-necked Woodpecker is the other member of the Campephilus genus that can be found there.

Guayaquil & Red-necked Woodpecker Illustration

Originally posted 11/24/10 - backdated to organize posts by topic.

The large bird depicted in this hand-colored lithograph by Delahaye appears in Alfred Malherbe's Monographie des picidées (1859-1862).  It is a Guayaquil Woodpecker, listed here with its old name Mégapic de Sclater.  Curiously, the sex of the bird is noted as male, and that appears to be an error.  The male Guayaquil Woodpecker's head is entirely red, but for a small black and white patch below its ear.   The female Guayaquil Woodpecker possesses a white band extending from the base of its bill to its white neck stripe.

The two pairs of birds in this illustration are two subspecies of the Red-necked Woodpecker.  While most of the illustrations in this work are excellent, these do not quite capture the splendid appearance of this bird.  It must have proved very challenging to draw these relatively large birds to such a small scale!

This image within the public domain appears here courtesy of the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

Red-necked Woodpecker

Red-necked Woodpecker (Campephilus rubricollis), Allpahuayo- Mishana Reserve, Peru, originally uploaded by palmchat.

Photos of the beautiful Red-necked Woodpecker are few and far between.

This photo of a male bird is © palmchat with thanks for sharing it here. Another person commented that this bird looks like an Ivory-billed Woodpecker, wearing a disguise!  It's no wonder.  There are only a few large woodpeckers that possess a striking ivory bill like the one you see on this bird.

This photo was taken at Allpahuayo-Mishana Reserve in Peru.

Read more about the reserve here.

Red-necked Woodpecker Video

Originally posted 10/27/10 - backdated to organize posts by topic.

I like this video of a male Red-necked Woodpecker by baco1970 for a couple of reasons.  First, it gives us a close up view of the bird's brilliant red head and neck with its spot of black and white on the lower ear coverts, its striking yellow eye and its large, pale bill.  Second, the video lasts for just 9 or 10 seconds which seems to me like all the time one might very well have to see this beautiful bird during a venture into the Amazon rain forest.

Press play, then change the setting at the lower right of the video box from  360p to 480p to watch it at higher resolution.

Red-necked and Crimson-crested Woodpeckers, Together!

Originally posted 12/20/10 - backdated to organize posts by topic.

I was amazed when I discovered this photo because I do not recall ever seeing two species of Campephilus woodpeckers on the same tree, in the same photo!   The bird on the left is a female Red-necked Woodpecker.  The bird on the right is a male Crimson-crested Woodpecker.   This great image is posted here by permission of Michel Giraud-Audine.  He took this photo in Kourou, Cayenne in French Guiana. 

Red-necked Woodpecker

Red-necked Woodpecker, originally uploaded by keir randall.

Photo © keir randall on Flickr and many thanks to him for granting permission to post it here. He took this photo of a male Red-necked Woodpecker in Shanklands, Essiquibo River, Guyana. The Red-necked Woodpecker is the least seldom photographed Campephilus, as far as I can tell, along with the Crimson-bellied Woodpecker. After a few days, I'll back-date and move this one and the Imperial Woodpecker photo below to their respective species areas. For now, each one is highlighted here on the home page.

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.
..............................
The Campo Flickers depicted above typically inhabit open and semi-open habitat, like savannas and pampas, in South America.

Red-necked Woodpecker - A Pair of Males

Photo © by Arthur Grosset and thanks to him for granting permission to post this photo of two male Red-necked Woodpeckers.  Arthur Grossest's site is here.

Red-necked Woodpecker

Photo © by Arthur Grosset and thanks to him for granting permission to post this photo of a male Red-necked Woodpecker.  Arthur Grossest's site is here.

Red-necked Woodpecker in Ecuador

Originally posted 10/22/10 - backdated to organize posts by topic.

Red-necked Woodpecker, originally uploaded by rowbird2005.

A leafy green and white make for an attractive background in this photo of a male Red-necked Woodpecker in Ecuador.   This bird is one of the less seldom photographed members of the Camp. genus, so special thanks to Forrest Rowland for granting permission to post his photo here. 

Album de aves amazonicas (1900)

Album de aves amazonicas by Emil August Göldi was published in 1900.  The book, including its many wonderful colored plates, is available for free download in various formats from the Biodiversity Hermitage Library at Internet Archive.  In this print, a pair of Red-necked Woodpeckers appears in the upper right corner, with the female bird in the foreground.  The large woodpecker in the middle resembles a female Crimson-crested Woodpecker, but is identified as a Lineated Woodpecker (Dryocopus lineatus) in the text.  Public domain image, courtesy of Internet Archive.

Find the book here at Internet Archive

Red-necked Woodpecker

red-necked woodpecker, originally uploaded by pixienicki.

Many thanks to pixienicki on Flickr for sharing her photo of a male Red-necked Woodpecker here. She took it near the Rio Tambopata in Peru. The photo is posted here with her permission.