The Story
This Black-banded Woodcreeper (Dendrocolaptes picumnus) climbed a pale trunk near La Macarena, in Meta, Colombia, braced upright on its stiff rufous tail. It eats mostly arthropods, including insects, spiders, scorpions and centipedes, and also small lizards and sometimes frogs. Lowland Amazonian populations forage mainly by following army-ant swarms to catch the prey they flush. It is found from southern Mexico to Panama and in every mainland South American country except Chile and Uruguay.
I photographed it with a Canon R5 and the RF 800mm f/11 plus the RF 1.4x extender, at 1/125 sec, f/16, ISO 1600. IUCN lists it as Least Concern but believes its population is decreasing, and some populations need nearly continuous forest and disappear from small forest fragments.
©2023 Adam Rainoff Photographer
The bird
The Black-banded Woodcreeper (Dendrocolaptes picumnus) belongs to the family Furnariidae (Ovenbirds and Woodcreepers) in the eBird/Clements taxonomy.
Source: eBird.org (opens in a new tab)
Conservation
Least Concern on the IUCN Red List (assessment published 2020), with the population trend listed as decreasing. Source: IUCN Red List