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Summary

The collared aracari or collared araçari (Pteroglossus torquatus) is a bird in the toucan family Ramphastidae. It is found from Mexico to Colombia and Venezuela.

Taxonomy

The collared aracari was described by the Spanish naturalist Francisco Hernández (1514–1587) in his work Rerum medicarum Novae Hispaniae thesaurus, seu, Plantarum animalium mineralium Mexicanorum historia which was published posthumously in 1651. In his Latin text Hernández used the name De Cochitenacatl, the word for the bird in the local Nahuatl language. Later ornithologists based their own descriptions on that by Hernández. These included Mathurin Brisson in 1760, the Comte de Buffon in 1780, and John Latham in 1782.

When the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin revised and expanded Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae in 1788 he included the collared aracari and cited the descriptions by earlier ornithologists. He placed it with the toucans in the genus Ramphastos and coined the binomial name Ramphastos torquatus. The specific epithet is a Latin word meaning "collared". When John Gould published a hand-coloured illustration of the collared aracari in 1854 he commented: "We find in the writings of the older authors—Gmelin, Latham, and others—a species of this family called Ramphastos torquatus, which may have been intended to indicate the present bird, but their descriptions and measurements are somewhat inapplicable; at the same time it is the only species yet discovered having a distinct reddish collar at the back of the neck, and there is no other bird which agrees so well with their obscure descriptions". The type location has been restricted to the state of Veracruz in southeast Mexico. The collared aracari is now one of 14 species placed in the genus Pteroglossus that was introduced in 1811 by Johann Karl Wilhelm Illiger.

The International Ornithological Committee (IOC) and BirdLife International's Handbook of the Birds of the World (HBW) recognize three subspecies:...