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
Orinoco piculet feathers are brown tipped with green, and the tail is black, the two central feathers having white inner webs and the outer feathers having a white bar near the tip. The beak is blackish and the legs grey. The call is a thin "seep-seep" and the song a rather longer suite of similar notes. The Orinoco piculet is endemic to eastern Colombia and northwestern Brazil, and is likely to be present also in the adjacent part of southern Venezuela. Its habitat is open tropical humid rainforest, gallery forest, wooded savannah and clumps of trees and scrub at altitudes of up