Pied puffbird


The pied puffbird is a species of puffbird in the family Bucconidae.
It is found in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Panama, Peru, Suriname, and Venezuela.
Its natural habitats are subtropical or tropical moist lowland forest and heavily degraded former forest.

Taxonomy

The pied puffbird 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-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. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Bucco tectus in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The pied puffbird is now placed in the genus Notharchus that was introduced by the German ornithologists Jean Cabanis and Ferdinand Heine in 1863. The generic name combines the Ancient Greek nōthēs meaning "sluggish" and arkhos meaning "leader" or "chief". The specific epithet tectus is Latin for "covered" or "concealed".
Three subspecies are recognised: