Uploaded August 2026 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
The brilliantly colored Kaempfer’s Woodpecker is endemic to the Cerrado, a sprawling, dry tropical savanna of open woodlands and riparian gallery forests in the central highlands of Brazil and neighboring Bolivia, though this remarkable woodpecker is found only in the former. The Cerrado biome is the most biodiverse savanna in the world, home to 30 endemic bird species found nowhere else in the world, including the Critically Endangered Blue-eyed Ground Dove. The Cerrado also hosts hundreds of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, as well as thousands of plants unique to the region.
A bamboo specialist, the Kaempfer’s Woodpecker drills holes into dead bamboo canes in search of the ant colonies that provide its main food. On the Cerrado, bamboo is largely restricted to dense patches of increasingly fragmented forest, often along waterways. The Kaempfer’s Woodpecker has a rather odd distribution within its range as a result, hundreds of small, isolated fragments of dense forest with bamboo scattered across the vast cerrado savanna landscape.
First collected in 1926, the Kaempfer’s Woodpecker was considered a subspecies of the Rufous-headed Woodpecker based on a single bird. It was 80 years before this bird was seen again, at which point many had considered it to be extinct. After its rediscovery, the Kaempfer’s Woodpecker was recognized as a separate species based on differences in its habitat, size, and plumage, as well as the great distance between this species’ range and that of the Rufous-headed Woodpecker. Genetic studies in the 2010s confirmed that this once-lost bird is, in fact, its own distinct species.
Also known as: Pica-pau-da-taboca (Portuguese), Caatinga Woodpecker
Learn more at abcbirds.org/bird/kaempfers-woodpecker
The brilliantly colored Kaempfer’s Woodpecker is endemic to the Cerrado, a sprawling, dry tropical savanna of open woodlands and riparian gallery forests in the central highlands of Brazil and neighboring Bolivia, though this remarkable woodpecker is found only in the former. The Cerrado biome is the most biodiverse savanna in the world, home to 30 endemic bird species found nowhere else in the world, including the Critically Endangered Blue-eyed Ground Dove. The Cerrado also hosts hundreds of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, and fish, as well as thousands of plants unique to the region.
A bamboo specialist, the Kaempfer’s Woodpecker drills holes into dead bamboo canes in search of the ant colonies that provide its main food. On the Cerrado, bamboo is largely restricted to dense patches of increasingly fragmented forest, often along waterways. The Kaempfer’s Woodpecker has a rather odd distribution within its range as a result, hundreds of small, isolated fragments of dense forest with bamboo scattered across the vast cerrado savanna landscape.
First collected in 1926, the Kaempfer’s Woodpecker was considered a subspecies of the Rufous-headed Woodpecker based on a single bird. It was 80 years before this bird was seen again, at which point many had considered it to be extinct. After its rediscovery, the Kaempfer’s Woodpecker was recognized as a separate species based on differences in its habitat, size, and plumage, as well as the great distance between this species’ range and that of the Rufous-headed Woodpecker. Genetic studies in the 2010s confirmed that this once-lost bird is, in fact, its own distinct species.
Also known as: Pica-pau-da-taboca (Portuguese), Caatinga Woodpecker
Learn more at abcbirds.org/bird/kaempfers-woodpecker
