Magellanic Snipe

About the Magellanic Snipe

The Magellanic snipe (Gallinago magellanica) is a bird in tribe Scolopancinai and subfamily Scolopacinae of family Scolopacidae, the sandpipers and relatives. It is found in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, and the Falkland Islands.

The taxonomic history of the New World snipes of genus Gallinago is complicated. What is now the Magellanic snipe has in the past been treated as a subspecies of common snipe (G. gallinago), then as conspecific with what are now the Pantanal snipe (G. paraguaiae) and the puna snipe (G. andina), and later still as conspecific with only the Pantanal 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 Magellanic and Pantanal 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. magellanica, the Magellanic snipe. The Magellanic snipe's face has distinct tan and darker brown stripes... Wikipedia →