Bermuda flicker

The Bermuda flicker (Colaptes oceanicus) is an extinct woodpecker from the genus Colaptes. It was confined to Bermuda and is known only by fossil remains dated to the Late Pleistocene and the Holocene. However, an old travel report by explorer Captain John Smith from the 17th century may also refer to this species.

Bermuda flicker
Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Aves
Order: Piciformes
Family: Picidae
Genus: Colaptes
Species:
C. oceanicus
Binomial name
Colaptes oceanicus
Olson, 2013[2]

Their nest holes usually can be found in Sabal bermudana palm trees or in rotten limbs and stumps of hardwoods.

Extinction

Though most material is from Late Pleistocene deposits unearthed by Storrs L. Olson, David B. Wingate and others in the Admirals Cave, the Wilkinson Quarry and in the Walsingham Sink Cave in Hamilton Parish in Bermuda in 1981, there is one bone, a tarsometatarsus from a juvenile, which is from a Holocene layer in the Spittal Pond. This fact, and an old travel report by John Smith from 1623, may lead to the assumption that this species just may have persisted until at least the early colonization of Bermuda. John Smith wrote:

Neither hath the Aire for her part been wanting with due supplies of many sorts of Fowles … numbers of small birds like Sparrowes and Robins, which haue lately beene destroyed by the wilde Cats, Wood-pickars, very many Crowes … .[3]

References
  1. BirdLife International (2017). "Colaptes oceanicus (amended version of 2016 assessment)". IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. 2017: e.T62322970A119208417. doi:10.2305/IUCN.UK.2017-3.RLTS.T62322970A119208417.en. Retrieved 11 January 2020.
  2. Olson, Storrs L. (2013). "Fossil woodpeckers from Bermuda with the description of a new species of Colaptes (Aves: Picidae)". Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington. 126 (#1): 17–24. doi:10.2988/0006-324X-126.1.17. S2CID 84248107.
  3. Quote In: Lefroy, J. H. (1981). Memorials of the discovery and early settlement of the Bermudas or Somers Islands 1515–1685. Second reprinting, volume 1. Bermuda Historical Society, Hamilton, p. 330


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