White-winged Swallow

About the White-winged Swallow

The white-winged swallow (Tachycineta albiventer) is a resident breeding swallow in tropical South America found in Brazil, Colombia, Venezuela, Trinidad, and Argentina. It is not found west of the Andes. This swallow is largely non-migratory.

The white-winged swallow was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1780 in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen collected in Cayenne, French Guiana. The bird was also illustrated in a hand-coloured plate engraved by François-Nicolas Martinet in the Planches Enluminées D'Histoire Naturelle which was produced under the supervision of Edme-Louis Daubenton to accompany Buffon's text. Neither the plate caption nor Buffon's description included a scientific name but in 1783 the Dutch naturalist Pieter Boddaert coined the binomial name Hirundo albiventer in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The white-winged swallow is now one of nine species placed in the genus Tachycineta that was introduced in 1850 by the German ornithologist Jean Cabanis. The species is monotypic and no subspecies are currently recognized. The genus name is from the Ancient Greek takhukinētos meaning "moving... Wikipedia →