Varzea piculet Varzea piculet The varzea piculet ("Picumnus varzeae") is a species of bird in the family Picidae, the woodpeckers, piculets, and wrynecks. It is endemic to Brazil's Amazon basin where it occurs in seasonally flooded Várzea forests, which gives the bird its common name. Its natural habitat is tropical moist lowland forest, and as the trees are progressively being cleared in the Amazon basin, the population of the bird is declining, and as a consequence, the International Union for Conservation of Nature has rated it as an "endangered species". This species was first described in 1912 by the German-Brazilian ornithologist Emilie
Piculet Piculet The piculets are a distinctive subfamily, Picumninae, of small woodpeckers which occur mainly in tropical South America, with just three Asian and one African species. Like the true woodpeckers, piculets have large heads, long tongues which they use to extract their insect prey and zygodactyl feet, with two toes pointing forward, and two backwards. However, they lack the stiff tail feathers that the true woodpeckers use when climbing trees, so they are more likely than their relatives to perch on a branch rather than an upright trunk. Their bills are shorter and less dagger-like than the true woodpeckers, so