European green woodpecker though the latter is smaller and more slender with narrower wings and longer tail. The closely related, very similar Levaillant's woodpecker occurs only in north-west Africa. The European green woodpecker is a member of the order Piciformes, the woodpecker family Picidae and the genus Picus. It was first described by Linnaeus in 1758. The scientific name is derived from the Greek "pikos", meaning 'woodpecker', and Latin "viridis", 'green'. There are four subspecies, with subtle and mostly clinal differences between them. In a recent study based on mitochondrial DNA analysis of subspecies by Perktaş, Barrowclough and Groth, it has been proposed
Cuban ivory-billed woodpecker of the Cuban form's behaviour and habitat was not published until 1893, when Juan Gundlach included it in Volume 1 of his "Ornitología Cubana". In Cuba it was usually known by the name of "carpintero real" (royal woodpecker), although this name was also used for other birds. As with "C. principalis", the Cuban ivory-bill was thought to inhabit old-growth forests with a plentiful supply of dead or dying trees; these were a source of the cerambycid and other beetle larvae that formed the bulk of its diet. Most of Cuba's lowland deciduous forests had been cleared by the early twentieth