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
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