Black-dotted piculet Foraging birds may repeat the song a few times and then fall silent for several minutes. Birds of this species forage in pairs, often widely separated, or alone. They occasionally join mixed-species flocks. They often "hitch sideways along branches," and they peck or drill like woodpeckers in rotting wood and at broken ends of branches. The taxonomy of "Picumnus" is controversial, and this taxon has been considered conspecific with the white-bellied piculet, conspecific with the golden-spangled piculet, and a synonym (incorrect name) of a subspecies of the scaled piculet ("P. squamulatus obsoletus"). Here it is considered a separate species following
Piculet of pronounced morphological similarities, but the two "Picumnus" lineages, despite having diverged long ago, are virtually alike except for head coloration (Fuchs "et al.", 2006). The Antillean piculet ("Nesoctites micromegas") has proven to be a very distinct species evolutionarily between piculets and woodpeckers (Benz "et al.", 2006) and thus is nowadays placed in a subfamily of its own. The arrangement of species in the genera follows del Hoyo "et al." (2002). Genus "Picumnus" Genus "Verreauxia" (sometimes included in "Sasia") Genus "Sasia" Piculet The piculets are a distinctive subfamily, Picumninae, of small woodpeckers which occur mainly in tropical South America, with