Racket-tailed Coquette

About the Racket-tailed Coquette

The racket-tipped thorntail, formerly called racket-tailed coquette, (Discosura longicaudus) is a species of hummingbird in subfamily lesbiinae of family Trochilidae. It is found in Brazil, Colombia, French Guiana, Guyana, Suriname, and Venezuela.

The racket-tipped thorntail was formally described in 1788 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with all the other hummingbirds in the genus Trochilus and coined the binomial name Trochilus longicaudus. Gmelin based his description on the "L'oiseau-mouche à raquettes" that had been described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1779 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux. Buffon did not specify the origin of his specimen but in 1902 Hans von Berlepsch and Ernst Hartert designated the type locality as Cayenne, French Guiana. The racket-tipped thorntail is now placed with four other hummingbirds in the genus Discosura that was introduced in 1850 by the French naturalist Charles Lucien Bonaparte. Formerly, some ornithologists erroneously used the binomial name Discosura longicauda instead of Discosura longicaudus... Wikipedia →