Paraguayan Snipe

About the Paraguayan Snipe

The Pantanal snipe (Gallinago paraguaiae) is a bird in tribe Scolopancinai and subfamily Scolopacinae of family Scolopacidae, the sandpipers and relatives. It is found on Trinidad and Tobago and in every mainland South American country (though only as a vagrant in Ecuador.)

The taxonomic history of the New World snipes of genus Gallinago is complicated. What is now the Pantanal snipe has in the past been treated as a subspecies of common snipe (G. gallinago), then as conspecific with what are now the Magellanic snipe (G. magellanica) and the puna snipe (G. andina), and later still as conspecific with only the Magellanic snipe. The South American Classification Committee of the American Ornithological Society, the International Ornithological Committee (IOC), and the Clements taxonomy treat all of them as separate species. However, BirdLife International's Handbook of the Birds of the World (HBW) retains the Pantanal and Magellanic snipes as subspecies of what it calls the South American snipe, with the binomial G. paraguaiae.

This article follows the IOC definition of a monotypic G. paraguaiae, the Pantanal snipe. The adult Pantanal snipe... Wikipedia →