Bermuda flicker

The Bermuda flicker 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 (explorer)|John Smith] from the 1600's may also refer to this species.

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 possibility that this species just may have persisted until at least the early colonization of Bermuda. Smith wrote: