African pygmy goose
species of bird
The African pygmy goose (Nettapus auritus) is a perching duck from sub-Saharan Africa. It is the smallest of Africa's waterfowl, and one of the smallest in the world.
Though pygmy geese have beaks like those of geese, they are more related to the dabbling ducks and other species called 'ducks'.
It is one of the species to which the Agreement on the Conservation of African-Eurasian Migratory Waterbirds (AEWA) applies.
Taxonomy
The African pygmy goose was described by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon in his Histoire Naturelle des Oiseaux in 1785. 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 Anas aurita in his catalogue of the Planches Enluminées. The type locality is Madagascar. The current genus Nettapus was erected by the German naturalist Johann Friedrich von Brandt 1836. The word Nettapus is from the Ancient Greek nētta "duck" and pous "foot".
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “African pygmy goose” as species of bird. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the science & nature register because the source frames it as species of bird. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q386949. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1785, 1783 and 1836.
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This entry incorporates text from “African pygmy goose” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.