Dendrocolaptes platyrostris (Planalto Woodcreeper)

Vasconcelos, Marcelo Ferreira de, 2018, First avifaunal survey of a Cerrado dry forest enclave on the right bank of the São Francisco River, Minas Gerais, Brazil, with insights on geographic variation of some species, Papéis Avulsos de Zoologia 58, pp. 1-18 : 7

Dendrocolaptes platyrostris (Planalto Woodcreeper)

Dendrocolaptes platyrostris was medium frequent in our sampling (IFL = 6.2%), being recorded almost exclusively in dry forest habitat (92.9%, n = 13), with a single record (7.1%) in the adjacent gallery forest.

Currently, two subspecies of D. platyrostris are recognized: D. p. platyrostris and D. p. intermedius ( Marantz, 1997; Marantz et al., 2003). A comprehensive revision of plumage variation of this species was recently present- ed by Cabanne et al. (2011), who found two areas of plumage stability: one in the Cerrado of central Brazil (population I) and another in southern Atlantic Forest (population II). They considered that population I represents D. p. intermedius and population II is represented by D. p. platyrostris, despite their type localities are out of those areas of plumage stability.

We collected four specimens of D. platyrostris in the study area (MCNA 5051, MCNA 5189, MCNA 5235, MCNA 5236). They are intermediate between both stable populations found by Cabanne et al. (2011), which also suggests geographic variation following Gloger’s ecogeographic rule.This was expected because Curral de Pedras is located between the range of the two areas of plumage stability. Also, the study area represents a collection gap for D. platyrostris . Thus, a detailed description of the plumage of the four specimens is presented on Table 2, following Cabanne et al. (2011). Despite presenting small interindividual variation, the specimens’ overall plumage pattern is darker and more similar to population II (southern Atlantic Forest) than to population I (central Brazil) ( Table 2). Some character states from our series do not correspond to any of those described by Cabanne et al. (2011) ( Table 2).