Rufous piculet creepers, bamboos and dead and rotting trees, often near streams. The rufous piculet is an active bird moving singly or in small groups through the lowest storeys of the forest, usually not above from the ground. It forages on trunks and dead branches, on vines, in bushes, among bamboos and in tall grasses. It gleans scrupulously, probing into holes and pulling out insects with its long tongue. It sometimes works its way up a trunk in a crosswise fashion, making little flights so as to turn to face the other way, the several members of a group often working in
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