Grey-breasted sabrewing
The grey-breasted sabrewing is a species of hummingbird in the family Trochilidae.
It is found in humid forest in the Guianas and the Amazon Basin with a smaller disjunct population in forest and woodland in Bahia and Minas Gerais in eastern Brazil.
A relatively large hummingbird with grey underparts and broad white tail-tips, it is generally common.Taxonomy
The grey-breasted sabrewing 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 Trochilus largipennis in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The grey-breasted sabrewing is now placed in the genus Campylopterus that was erected by the English naturalist William Swainson in 1827. The generic name combines the Ancient Greek kampulos meaning "curved" or "bent" and -pteros meaning "-winged". The specific epithet largipennis combines the Latin largus meaning "ample" and -pennis meaning "-winged".Subspecies
Four subspecies are recognised:
- C. l. largipennis – east Venezuela, the Guianas, north Brazil
- C. l. obscurus Gould, 1848 – northeast Brazil
- C. l. aequatorialis Gould, 1861 – east Colombia and northwest Brazil to north Bolivia
- C. l. diamantinensis Ruschi, 1963 – southeast Brazil
