The Golden-cheeked Woodpecker (Melanerpes chrysogenys), restricted to the Pacific slope of Mexico from Sinaloa to Oaxaca, comprises two subspecies. Nominate M. c. chrysogenys, identified by its extensively red crown, ranges from Sinaloa south to San Blas, Nayarit (Winkler and Christie 2017). Ridgway (1914) stated that near San Blas there is an abrupt transition from the reddish-naped M. c. chrysogenys to the yellow-naped M. c. flavinuchus, which is distributed southward to western Oaxaca. The subspecies also differ in the amount of yellow in the face, with flavinuchus averaging less yellow; this subspecies is also generally paler overall (Ridgway 1914). The distinction between these two subspecies, however, is perhaps not widely appreciated. For example, geographic variation in the crown pattern of the Golden-cheeked Woodpecker was not mentioned by Howell and Webb (1995), who illustrated only flavinuchus. The question of intergradation between the two subspecies has not been addressed in the literature previously. Therefore, we investigated it by evaluating 172 specimens in the collection of the Moore Laboratory of Zoology (MLZ), 14 specimens in the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (LACM), five specimens in the Dickey Bird and Mammal Collection of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and 31 specimens in the Western Foundation of Vertebrate Zoology (WFVZ), Camarillo, California.