Cape teal
species of bird
The Cape teal (Anas capensis) also Cape wigeon or Cape widgeon is a 44–46 cm long dabbling duck of open wetlands in sub-Saharan Africa.
Taxonomy
The Cape teal 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 all the ducks, geese and swans in the genus Anas and coined the binomial name Anas capensis. Gmelin based his description on the "Cape widgeon" that had been described in 1785 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 teal by Georg Forster who had accompanied James Cook on his second voyage to the Pacific Ocean. His picture was drawn in 1773 at the Cape of Good Hope. This picture is now the holotype for the species and is held by the Natural History Museum in London. The genus name Anas is the Latin word for a duck. The specific epithet capensis indicates the Cape of Good Hope. The species is monotypic: no subspecies are recognised.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Cape teal” is species of bird. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Cape, teal and species, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “species of bird” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Datasets, specimens, observations and peer-reviewed methods provide the appropriate test for the technical claims summarized here. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 28, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q194317. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1789, 1785 and 1773.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cape teal” 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.