Birds and Birding's Guide to:

Watching THE SPARROW-LIKE BIRDS

THE FREE-TOED PERCHING BIRDS

THE WOOD HEWERS

(Family Dendrocolaptida)
Under the collective name of Wood Hewers there is aggregated a considerable group of typical neotropical birds numbering about one hundred species, disposed among some twelve genera, which may be taken as representing the Woodpeckers in the mesomyodian series. They are small or medium-sized birds, few exceeding ten inches in length and many falling between six and eight inches, in which the prevailing color is brown in various shades and tints, the tail in a large proportion being a uniform chestnut or ferruginous, while quite uniformly the breast and often the head and back are relieved by buff or whitish spots or shaft streaks. In the form of the tail-feathers the Wood Hewers especially simulate the Woodpeckers, these being stiffened and spiny, and serving to press them against the trunks of trees about which they climb, and thus prevent their slipping downward. The structure of the feet adapts them to the same office as those of the Woodpeckers, though in quite a different manner, for while not zygodactylous, they have the three toes closely bound together for the whole length of the basal phalanx, while the outer toe is nearly as long as the middle one, and considerably longer than the innermost toe; the claws are rather long and sharpened. The bill while usually strong is not especially marked, being as a rule curved and in some forms is extraordinarily long and quite slender. Although they often tap and hammer on the bark or wood, they do not chisel into the wood for their prey, as do the Woodpeckers, but seek it in the cracks and crevices of the bark, more after the manner of Nuthatches and Creepers.
As additional technical characters it may be mentioned that the Dendro-colaptidcB have holorhinal nostrils, the hinder border of the sternum with a single pair of notches, and the arrangement of the scales on the tarsus of the endaspidean type, that is, have the scales lap round the inner side but deficient on the outside.
“As to the habits of the Wood-Hewers, not much seems to be known, and the little that is on record is of a very general or vague character. They climb up or down the trunks of trees in the manner of true Creepers {Certhiida), often spirally, and like the Creepers after ascending to the top of one tree-trunk, fly to the base of another, which is ascended in the same fashion. The position in climbing is always upright, as in the case of the Creepers, never inverted as is the habit of Nuthatches. According to Dr. Richmond, the Dendrocolaptidce may nearly always be found among the miscellaneous congregation of birds attracted by processions of the army ant, upon which, together with various insects which they start from their hiding places, they feed with avidity. Their notes are usually harsh, often notably so. They breed usually in holes of trees, after the fashion of Woodpeckers, though a nest of Glyphorkynchus cuneatus found by Dr. Richmond was in a small natural cavity at the foot of a tree, not more than ten inches from the ground; it contained two eggs, which were pure white in color.”— Ridgway.

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