Lesser swallow-tailed swift
species of bird
The lesser swallow-tailed swift or Cayenne swift (Panyptila cayennensis) is a species of bird in subfamily Apodinae of the swift family Apodidae. It is found from southern Mexico through Central America; in every mainland South America country except Argentina, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay; and on Trinidad.
Taxonomy and systematics
The lesser swallow-tailed swift 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 swallows and swifts in the genus Hirundo and coined the binomial name Hirundo cayennensis. Gmelin based his description on the "Martinet à collier blanc" that had been described in 1779 by the French polymath Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon from a specimen collected in Cayenne, French Guiana. A hand-colored illustration of the bird was also published. The lesser swallow-tailed swift is now placed with the great swallow-tailed swift in the genus Panyptila that was introduced in 1847 by the German ornithologist Jean Cabanis. The genus name combines the Ancient Greek panu meaning "very" or "exceedingly" with ptilon meaning "wing". The specific epithet cayennensis is from Cayenne, the type locality.
According to the International Ornithological Committee (IOC) the species is monotypic: no subspecies are recognized.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lesser swallow-tailed swift” 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.