White-bellied seedsnipe
The white-bellied seedsnipe is a species of bird in the Thinocoridae family. It is found in southwestern Argentina and Tierra del Fuego. It is a vagrant to the Falkland Islands. Its natural habitats are temperate grassland and swamps.Taxonomy
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-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 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. The specific epithet refers to the Îles Malouines, the French name for the Falkland Islands. The species is monotypic.
