Magellanic Tapaculo

About the Magellanic Tapaculo

The Magellanic tapaculo (Scytalopus magellanicus) is a small passerine bird in the tapaculo family Rhinocryptidae that is found in southern South America. The Magellanic tapaculo was formally described in 1789 by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich Gmelin in his revised and expanded edition of Carl Linnaeus's Systema Naturae. He placed it with the wagtails in the genus Motacilla and coined the binomial name Motacilla magellanica. Gmelin based his description on the "Magellanic warbler" that had been described in 1783 by the English ornithologist John Latham in his A General Synopsis of Birds. The naturalist Joseph Banks had provided Latham with a water-colour drawing of the bird by Georg Forster who had accompanied James Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific Ocean. The picture is dated 28 December 1774 at Tierra del Fuego. This picture is now the holotype for the species and is held by the Natural History Museum in London. The species is monotypic: no subspecies are recognised.

The species was often known as the Andean tapaculo in the past and included a number of subspecies distributed along the Andes. These are now treated as species in their own right, leaving... Wikipedia →