LAUSR

The endemic Magellanic Woodpecker (Campephilus magellanicus), the southernmost and largest extant congener of the Ivory-billed woodpecker (C. principalis), is among the most iconic species of the Valdivian forest ecoregion. Threatened by habitat loss and fragmentation and with less than one-third of its original extent remaining, the Valdivian ecoregion is one of the world's 32 biodiversity hotspots (Olson et al. 2001). Within these forests, Magellanic Woodpeckers are foraging specialists and use their long, harpoon-tipped tongues to extract saproxylic insect larvae from the bark and heartwood of decayed Nothofagaceae trees. The woodpecker is not considered an important consumer of fruit or seed disperser, though anecdotal reports indicate that birds occasionally consume vertebrates and fruit (Willson et al., 1994; Ojeda & Chazarreta 2006). Importantly, these previous observations did not specifically indicate if seeds were consumed intact and only described that the woodpeckers pecked at small fruits (i.e., < 1 cm diameter) to the point of potentially destroying seeds. Here, we provide new evidence that females and juveniles, when competitively displaced from preferred foraging microhabitat by males, regularly consume fruits and may act as an important seed disperser in the threatened Valdivian forests. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.