The Story
The place
Caracolí Bird House, Villavicencio, Meta, Colombia. I photographed this Little Woodpecker here on September 15, 2025, at about 7:10 a.m.
eBird lists 94 species all-time at Caracolí Bird House (as of October 2026).
The shot
This Little Woodpecker (Veniliornis passerinus) clung to a tree trunk at Caracolí Bird House, a rural birding lodge in the vereda Zuria outside Villavicencio, in Meta, Colombia, while tending a nest with its mate. Males of the nominate subspecies have a red forehead, crown and nape, while females are grayish olive-brown with indistinct white spots where the male is red. Little Woodpeckers feed alone, in pairs, in small groups or with mixed-species flocks, taking adult and larval insects, including ants, termites and beetles. It forages at every level of the forest, from the undergrowth to the canopy.
I made this frame with a Canon R5 and the RF 800mm f/11 plus the RF 1.4x extender, at 1/90 sec, f/16, ISO 3200. Caracolí Bird House is a public eBird hotspot, so the birds seen there go into a shared record that anyone can use.
©2026 Adam Rainoff Photographer
The bird
The Little Woodpecker (Veniliornis passerinus) belongs to the family Picidae (Woodpeckers) in the eBird/Clements taxonomy.
Source: eBird.org (opens in a new tab)
Conservation
Least Concern on the IUCN Red List (assessment published 2018), with the population trend listed as stable. Source: IUCN Red List
