Red-billed Woodcreeper

The red-billed woodcreeper is one of the largest members of its subfamily. It is heavy-bodied, with a shortish tail and a short and massive bill. It is 25 to 30 cm (9.8 to 12 in) long. Males weigh 112 to 137.5 g (4.0 to 4.9 oz) and females 110 to 145 g (3.9 to 5.1 oz). The sexes have the same plumage. Adults have smoky brown to olive-brown head, back, and wing coverts. Their rump, wings, and tail are bright rufous to rufous-chestnut, with dusky tips on the primaries. They have whitish lores and a white "moustache" that extends under the eye. Their throat is olive-brown with a paler center, their breast grayish brown, their belly buffy brown, and their undertail coverts brown with a rufescent cast. Their iris is brown, reddish brown, or red. Their bill is wine-red to brownish and their legs and feet green or olive with some brown and gray. Juveniles have weak streaks on their crown, are more heavily barred and rufescent below than adults, and have dark gray eyes and a dusky to blackish bill.

The red-billed woodcreeper is found in the northeastern Amazon Basin from eastern Venezuela east through the Guianas and northern Brazil north of the Amazon River between the Rio Negro and Amapá state. It mostly inhabits humid terra firme forest. It also occurs in gallery forest, várzea, and forest on sandy soil, and in Suriname rarely in savanna. It favors the interior of primary forest but occasionally occurs at its edges and in mature secondary forest. It is found only at low elevations.

The red-billed woodcreeper's diet is mostly a wide variety of arthropods and also includes small vertebrates such as frogs and snakes. It typically forages singly or in pairs. It often follows army ant swarms and joins mixed-species feeding flocks. It forages by sallies from a vertical perch, fairly low when attending ant swarms and up to the subcanopy elsewhere. It has also been observed digging for prey in rotten wood and termite nests.