Woodpeckers

This group gathers Birds subcategory members belonging to the order Piciformes, whose best-known family is the true woodpeckers, equipped with a chisel-like bill, a reinforced skull and a long, barbed tongue used to excavate wood-boring insects from tree trunks and branches, along with the closely related wrynecks, which share the same family but forage on the ground rather than drilling into wood. The same order also includes two more distantly related families represented in this subcategory, the toucans of Central and South America, recognized by an enormous, lightweight, brightly colored bill, and the barbets, stout, often colorful fruit and insect eaters found across the tropics of Africa, Asia and the Americas. What unites this otherwise visually varied order is a shared zygodactyl foot, two toes forward and two back, and a shared evolutionary origin confirmed by the group's underlying anatomy and DNA rather than by any single obvious shared trait.