The longclaws are a

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of living and fossil organisms as well as viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus comes above species and below family. In binomial nom ...

, ''Macronyx'', of small African

passerine A passerine () is any bird of the order Passeriformes (; from Latin 'sparrow' and '-shaped'), which includes more than half of all bird species. Sometimes known as perching birds, passerines are distinguished from other orders of birds by th ...

birds in the family

Motacillidae The wagtails, longclaws, and pipits are a family, Motacillidae, of small passerine birds with medium to long tails. Around 70 species occur in five genera. The longclaws are entirely restricted to the Afrotropics, and the wagtails are predomin ...

. Longclaws are slender, often colorful, ground-feeding insectivores of open country. They are ground nesters, laying up to four speckled eggs. They are named for their unusually long hind claws, which are thought to help in walking on grass. There are only between 10,000 and 19,000 Sharpe's longclaw left in Kenya. The genus ''Macronyx'' was introduced by the English naturalist William John Swainson in 1827 with the Cape longclaw as the

type species In zoological nomenclature, a type species (''species typica'') is the species name with which the name of a genus or subgenus is considered to be permanently taxonomically associated, i.e., the species that contains the biological type specime ...

. The name combines the

Classical Greek Ancient Greek includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), Dark Ages (), the Archaic peri ...

words "long" or "great" and "claw".

Species list

The genus contains eight species:

References

External links

Longclaw videos
on the Internet Bird Collection {{Taxonbar, from=Q389600 Macronyx