The Science of Birds - Random Bird Thursday: A Sparrow-sized Drummer from the Neotropics

Episode Date: November 6, 2025

In each Random Bird Thursday (RBT) episode, the goal is to highlight a bird species that probably isn't going to get featured in a full-length podcast episode. These are birds we might overlook, even though they certainly deserve some appreciation and attention. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~⚠️ SPOILER ALERT!The featured species in this episode is the Little Woodpecker (Veniliornis passerinus)Support the show

Hello and welcome. This is the Science of Birds. I am your host, Ivan Philipson. The Science of Birds podcast is a lighthearted exploration of bird biology for lifelong learners. I'm happy to say that it's Random Bird Thursday. Random Bird Thursday episodes are relatively short and sweet. In each, I spotlight a bird species that probably won't get featured in a full-length episode. With over 11,000 bird species in the world,

Random Bird Thursday gives us a chance to celebrate one that we might otherwise overlook. So let's go ahead and do it. Let's push the Random Bird Selector button and see who we're talking about today. Okay, we have the Little Woodpecker, Vanilla Ornus Passerinus. That's pretty exciting. You know, any woodpecker is an A-plus in my book, so this is great. Let's go ahead and get into it. So as you might guess from the name, this is a small woodpecker. And it's got a typical body shape for a small woodpecker.

It's got those stiff tail feathers that help the bird brace itself against the tree trunk when it's foraging. And it's got the classic zygodactal toe arrangement of woodpeckers. Remember that? That's two toes forward and two toes back. Now, when we say little, this is a very small woodpecker. It's not the smallest member of the family, but it is one of the first. the smaller species. We're talking 5.5 to 6 inches long from beak to tail, which is about 14 to 15 centimeters. If you live in North America, you might be familiar with the Downy Woodpecker. That's Dryobaties pubescence. The little woodpecker is about the same size as the Downey

Woodpecker. Or if you live in Eurasia, you might know the lesser spotted woodpecker, Dryobaties Minor. Likewise, it's roughly the same size as the Little Woodpecker. And of course, if you live in Australia, well then, uh, you're kind of screwed because there are no woodpeckers in Australia. So you have no idea how big the little woodpecker is, unless you have a mental image of what 14 to 15 centimeters looks like. The bill on this little guy is typical for woodpeckers. It's got that strong chisel shape, but on this species, it's relatively long for a small woodpecker, and it's blackish in color. The beak, that is, not the bird. In terms of the bird's color overall, well, on the back, on the top side, it's kind of a bronzy olive green

color or greenish brown. Overall, the effect is kind of dusky from a distance. The underparts are dark olive, but they're a bit more pale than the top, and there are these nice, buffish-white bars running across the belly and breast. There's a small difference between the male and the female. The male, like many other male woodpeckers, has some red on his head. so he has a red crown and nape, whereas the female lacks this red color on the head. And the little woodpecker has dark brown eyes. Perhaps to the surprise of no one, I think this woodpecker is pretty cute. I mean, come on, little woodpecker.

Take a look at some pictures online and you can decide for yourself. Okay, so what does this little guy sound like? Well, so its call is pretty simple. It's just something like ki-ki-ki-ki-ki or wee-wee-wee-wee-wee, and it carries quite a ways through the bird's habitat, through the forest. So it's kind of a long-distance call. But I've got a few recordings for you here, and this first one was recorded in Ecuador, at about 3,000 feet in elevation or 900 meters on the eastern slopes of the Andes. And this is the call. Here is another example.

This is a short recording of a little woodpecker made in Bolivia. And the final recording I have for you is the bird, the little woodpecker making a drumming sound. so recall that woodpeckers make drumming noises as another form of communication among themselves they make tapping noises while they're foraging of course while they're chisling out wood but drumming is them actually beating their bill against wood to make a sound specifically for communication so here's a little woodpecker drumming and it was recorded in brazil Okay, so we've talked about what the bird looks like and what it sounds like. Let's move on and talk about the name, the scientific name.

Vanilla Ornus Pasarinus. The taxonomy of this species, its scientific name, has changed a few times over the centuries. At one point, it was moved from vanilla ornus to the genus Dryobatis, which you may recall from earlier is the same genus that the Downey Woodpeckers in and a little spotted woodpecker. And in fact, it was only quite recently this year that the little woodpecker was moved back from Dryobadis to Vanilla Ornus. So for a while there it was Dryobadis Passerinus,

and now once again it is Vanilla Ornus Paserinus. And in this most recent taxonomy change, the genus Dryobaties has been broken apart and re-rearines. arranged. There's all kinds of changes there. And I'll probably talk about that maybe next month because I'd like to do an episode rounding up all of the interesting or many of the interesting ornithology stories from this year. And also in that episode, I want to do a bit of discussion about the recent taxonomy changes. So stay tuned for that episode. Now, some taxonomic authorities have yet to update this bird.

So, for example, when I went to I Naturalist, it still had this species, the little woodpecker, listed under Dryobades, Pasirinus. In any case, at present, this bird is one of 14 species in the genus Vanilla Ornus,

and all of those species are small, brown, or greenish, neotropical woodpeckers. Okay, so where do this name come from? Vanilla Ornus, right? well when the first naturalists tasted this little woodpecker they thought it tasted like vanilla

so that no that's not where the name came from because it's actually not even spelled quite like that vanilla ornus is V-E-N-I-L-I-O-N-I-N-I-S I kind of wish that vanilla was the root word there that would be fun but no this actually comes to us from Latin

and it kind of means of the sea and winds and in fact in Roman mythology Vanilla was a deity, a sea and wind nymph, the wife of Janus. You know, the guy where we get the name of the month, January. Okay, so Vanilia, Vaniliornis comes from Vanilia, and that originally meant of the sea and winds. And why that was applied to this bird or these birds, I do not know.

You know, I try to track these things down and maybe that information's out there, but I could not find it. I always welcome information from you if you know the answer. answer. But moving on to the second part, the specific epithet, Pasarinus. That one is much more straightforward. That also comes to us from Latin, and it means, maybe you could guess this, sparrow-like. Pasarinus means like a sparrow. And that's kind of cool because, of course, it's a little woodpecker. All of its cousins, all of these guys in this genus are very small. So they're sparrow-like woodpeckers. Now, do you recall what the family is of woodpeckers?

Maybe you remember from way back in episode 11 when I covered this family that the family name of the family name for woodpeckers is Pickety, P-I-C-I-D-A-E. Within that family, the closest relatives of the little woodpecker are the blood-colored woodpecker and the dot-fronted woodpecker. And in fact, the little woodpecker sometimes hybridizes with the dot-fronted woodpecker. So these are fairly closely related species. researchers using genetic data DNA have analyzed the evolutionary history of this genus and we have some estimates for when this lineage originated and that was probably about 5.1 million years ago the hypothesis the idea is that before they made it to south america woodpeckers would have been in north america and they came down to south america only once the isthmus

of panama formed which was about 3.5. million years ago. There's that word again. It isthmus. That's one of my favorites to pronounce on the podcast. It's isthmus. Oh my gosh. It's a cool word though. Okay. So Woodpeckers came to South America from North America across the itthmus of Panama. And then they diversified in South America and that diversification began maybe 3.3 million years ago. But less than a half a million years ago, maybe 300,000 years ago, is when we got the split between the Little Woodpecker and its closest relative, the Dot-fronted Woodpecker. Now, if we look at diversity within the Little Woodpecker, we find that it has nine subspecies that

ornithologists have recognized. These subspecies are recognizable by differences in size, the presence of facial stripes, or not, the extent of red on the male's head, and the general color or tone of the upper parts. Some of them maybe have a little more yellowish than green. And also the extent of barring and spotting differs among the subspecies. But the subspecies tend to blend together at their geographic boundaries. So they show what we call clinal variation. You might remember that from just a couple episodes ago, episode 123, which was about subspecies. And that's one of the challenges with subspecies, right? Because they don't always these clearly defined boundaries between them. They kind of just blend together across the

landscape. Where does one end and the other begin? That is not always easy to tell. Okay, so we've been talking about South America, so you know this bird lives in South America. Specifically, it lives throughout the Amazon basin, to the east and south of the Andes Mountain Range. It's found pretty much across every mainland South American country except for Chile, Suriname, and Uruguay. So it has a really large range, including most of Brazil, which is one of the largest countries in the world. Within that range, the habitat is pretty diverse. The little woodpecker prefers edges, so edges of forest where forest transitions to open woodland or grassland. This bird also likes clearings and places where there's secondary growth in terms of forest. So again, the habitat is

diverse. We're talking cloud forests, riparian forests, gallery forest, places with lots of bamboo, they really like bamboo, deciduous woodland, mangroves, the edges of swamps, savannas, shrub forests like the Kachinga, which we've talked about before on the podcast, and it will even occasionally visit human gardens. So kind of a habitat generalist across its range, sort of, and this species does not really migrate as far as we know. It's pretty much a resident across its range. And in terms of conservation, I have good news. It's in the least concern category at the IUCN. As far as we know, there are no immediate threats. It has a broad range, as we just discussed, the population seems to be stable. And because it can thrive in many different habitats, that gives it some resilience.

Now, that said, deforestation is ongoing in South America across many parts of this bird's range. In fact, there's an estimated loss of 16 to 18.3% of forest habitat over the next three generations or so of this bird, maybe 15 to 20 years. So up to 18.3%, that's almost 20% loss in forest habitat. That's pretty significant. But again, because the species is seemingly adaptable and resilient, maybe it will be able to survive and continue to thrive. Let's hope so. Okay, what does the little woodpecker eat? Well, the primary diet is ants, termites, beetles, and beetle larvae, and other insects. Little woodpeckers forage in mostly semi-open sites,

maybe down low in the undergrowth or up into the higher levels of the trees. And when bamboo is present in the habitat, it really likes bamboo, as I mentioned earlier. So little woodpeckers are scrabbling around on the bamboo or tree branches, and there's lots of pecking and hammering on the bark and branches and limbs. And in its foraging, it's going to drill little holes to pull out things like beetle larvae and so on. ants, termites, all those juicy, juicy insects. And you might see one little woodpecker foraging by itself, or maybe in a pair, or even with a few individuals. And if it's feeling especially social, this bird will get together with a bunch of other species to form a mixed species flock.

We've talked about those before on the podcast as well. Now, there's not a whole lot of information on how this. these birds breed. But they're probably monogamous, and there are some known courtship displays where the birds will spread their wings and their tails and swing their heads around kind of ridiculously and impress each other that way. And the nest is excavated. It's carved out of a tree stump or a palm tree or even bamboo. Typically, the nest is somewhere between 15 and 45 feet off the ground, which is 5 to 13 meters. And it seems that the male alone is the one who excavates the nest hole.

So then you've got some eggs and the chicks hatch and both the male and the female feed the chicks. And in one study, there was a calculation of the parents visiting the nest with food 5.2 times per hour. And in that same study, they described the nest and they talked about the layer of sawdust on the inside of the cavity, a few inches deep. and they described the cavity as being very wet and it had a putrid smell. So I can only imagine the research is, you know, climbing up into a tree, you know, looking into the nest, sticking their nose in there

and going, oh my, ah! Just like totally grossed out by the smell. And, you know, poor little woodpeckers, they probably have no idea how their nest smells really bad. But hey, it's their house. They can do whatever they want. The male little woodpecker actually stays in the nest overnight with the nestlings.

He does that night after. night while I guess the female like goes to the club or something with her girlfriends. I don't know. I don't know what she's doing. But if dad does a good job and keeps the nestlings alive, they fledge at about 13 days old. Now this comes from just a little bit of data. There's like one study on just like one nest. So I'll take all of this with a grain of salt, but it's what we got. In terms of how long these woodpeckers live, we have no idea. But the BirdLife International website reports that the generation length is about 4.2 years. Now, generation length is not the same as lifespan. Generation length is more about the timing of reproduction, not about when

birds die. So, generation length is often quite less than lifespan. For example, in humans, generation length is about 27 years. Whereas life expectancy, you know, whatever it is these days, 65, 70, depending where you live. So it varies from species to species. The relationship between generation length and lifespan. It's very complicated, but these little guys live probably more than a few years, which is great. Have I seen a little woodpecker? No, I have not. I had to check my data. I thought maybe I had, but nope. And I guess that kind of makes sense because I think I've only really been in their habitat, this species habitat or within its range, for just a couple days when I just dipped my toe into the Amazon basin for a couple days in Ecuador. So I hope I see the little woodpecker someday, and I'm curious, have you seen this bird? If so, and you have a story you want to tell me about it, that would be great. You can send me an email at Ivan at Scienceofbirds.com. And that, my friends, is random bird Thursday.

That's what we've got for the little woodpecker. Vanilla ornus passerinus. The sparrow-like vanilla-tasting bird that was formerly known as Dryobatis Pasarinus. I hope you enjoyed this short episode, and I will talk to you in the next one. Cheers.