11-431: Picumnus Verreauxia Sasia 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
22-433: A monotypic genus, Vivia ). Their upperparts are brownish, greyish or olive, in some species with darker barring or white or yellowish spotting on the mantle. The underparts vary greatly among the species, ranging from all rich brown in the chestnut piculet, to whitish in the plain-breasted piculet, white with dark bars in the white-barred piculet, and pale yellowish with dark bars on the chest and dark spots and streaks on
33-464: Is nowadays placed in a subfamily of its own. The arrangement of species in the genera is as follows Genus Picumnus Genus Sasia Genus Verreauxia Picumnus (bird) See text Picumnus is a large genus of piculets . With a total length of 8–10 cm (3–4 in), they are among the smallest birds in the woodpecker family. All species are found in the Neotropics except
44-510: Is probably due to changes in topology and climate fluctuations during the Pliocene and Pleistocene . The genus Verreauxia may be accepted because of pronounced morphological similarities, but the two Picumnus lineages, despite having diverged long ago, are virtually alike except for head coloration. The Antillean piculet ( Nesoctites micromegas ) has proven to be a very distinct species evolutionarily between piculets and woodpeckers and thus
55-464: The speckled piculet ( Picumnus innominatus ) that has a wide distribution in China, India and Southeast Asia . Species limits in this genus are doubtful, and the rate of interbreeding is "inordinately high" (Remsen et al. 2007). As defined by Winkler and Christie (2002), it contains the 27 species listed below, all from the Neotropics except the speckled piculet, which is Asian (and sometimes placed in
66-403: The belly in the bar-breasted piculet. They have black crowns with red, orange, or yellow marks in the male and white dots in the female, except that the male speckled piculet has brown crown marks and the female lacks white dots. Most have rather short black tails with white stripes down the edges and the center (Blume and Winkler 2003). In two species, the rufous-breasted and the chestnut piculets,
77-588: The evolution of piculets is now considered rather straightforward. The disjunct occurrence of the genera, with one African species of the Southeast Asian Sasia and one Southeast Asian species of the American Picumnus is of comparatively recent origin. Molecular dating, calibrated with geographic events in the absence of a good fossil record, points at the Late Miocene , c. 8 MYA , as the point where
88-570: The first having a song consisting of a long trill, and the second a song consisting of series of two or more descending notes. The genus Picumnus was introduced in 1825 by the Dutch zoologist Coenraad Jacob Temminck . He listed three species in the genus but did not specify the type . In 1840 George Gray designated the type as Picumnus minutissimus Temminck, 1825. This is now preoccupied in Picumnus by Picus minutissimus Pallas , 1782. The genus name
99-577: 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 they look for insects and grubs mainly in decaying wood. Similarly, they re-use woodpecker holes for nesting, rather than making their own holes. The eggs are white, as with many hole nesters. Typically these birds have grey or dull green upperparts and dark-streaked white underparts. Although not well known from fossils ,
110-486: The two genera divided into their two respective lineages. At that time, there was a notable global cooling period. The molecular distances between piculets and woodpeckers are comparatively small for subfamilies, agreeing with the hypothesis that the split between the three groups of woodpecker-like picids subfamilies occurred only during the Miocene climatic optimum , around 15 MYA. The later radiation of South American piculets
121-419: The white is largely replaced by rufous. While the individual species often are habitat specialists (as evident by a number of highly restricted species such as the rusty-necked and ochraceous piculets), members of this genus range from dry Caatinga woodland to humid Amazonian and Atlantic Forest . They are generally found in pairs or small groups. The Neotropical species fall into two broad song groups, with
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