Swallow-tailed Hummingbird

About the Swallow-tailed Hummingbird

The swallow-tailed hummingbird (Eupetomena macroura) is a species in the hummingbird family (Trochilidae), found mainly in east-central South America. Most authorities place it in the genus Eupetomena, although some place it in Campylopterus based on song and the thick shafts of the males' first primaries. Its common name and specific epithet (which means "large-tailed") both refer to the long, deeply forked, somewhat swallow-like tail.

The swallow-tailed hummingbird 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, coined the binomial name Trochilus macrourus and specified the type locality as Jamaica. Gmelin cited earlier authors including Hans Sloane who in 1725 had described and illustrated a humming bird from Jamaica and Mathurin Jacques Brisson who in 1760, had described and illustrated a hummingbird from Cayenne, French Guiana. In 1929 Carl Eduard Hellmayr argued that Gmelin conflated two different species and that his diagnosis applied to Brisson's specimen from Cayenne; Sloane's Jamaican bird... Wikipedia →