White-bellied Seedsnipe

About the White-bellied Seedsnipe

The white-bellied seedsnipe (Attagis malouinus) is a species of bird in suborder Scolopaci of order Charadriiformes, the shorebirds. It is found Argentina and Chile. The white-bellied seedsnipe was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in 1772, in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux from a specimen collected on the Falkland Islands. The bird was also illustrated in a hand-colored 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 Tetrao malouinus in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées.

The white-bellied seedsnipe is now placed in the genus Attagis that was erected by the French ornithologists Isidore Saint-Hilaire and René Lesson in 1831. Attagis was used for a game bird in Ancient Greek texts. It probably referred to the black francolin (Francolinus francolinus).

The specific epithet malouinus refers to the Îles Malouines, the French... Wikipedia →