Vervain hummingbird
species of bird
The vervain hummingbird (Mellisuga minima) is a species of hummingbird in tribe Mellisugini of subfamily Trochilinae, the "bee hummingbirds". It is found on Hispaniola (split between the Dominican Republic and Haiti) and Jamaica.
Taxonomy and systematics
The vervain hummingbird was formally described by the Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus in 1758 in the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae under the binomial name Trochilus minimus. Linnaeus based his description on a bird that had been described and illustrated in 1747 by the English naturalist George Edwards. The type locality is Jamaica. The vervain hummingbird is now placed together with the tiny Cuban bee hummingbird in the genus Mellisuga that was introduced by the French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in 1760.
Two subspecies of vervain hummingbird are recognised, the nominate M. m. minima (Linnaeus, 1758) and M. m. vielloti (Shaw, 1812).
Description
The vervain hummingbird is perhaps the second-smallest bird in the world after the smallest, the bee hummingbird, though some other tiny ones are close to it in size.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vervain hummingbird” 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.