The
avian
Avian may refer to:
*Birds or Aves, winged animals
*Avian (given name) (russian: Авиа́н, link=no), a male forename
Aviation
*Avro Avian, a series of light aircraft made by Avro in the 1920s and 1930s
*Avian Limited, a hang glider manufacture ...
genus ''Quiscalus'' contains seven of the 11 species of
grackles, gregarious
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 t ...
bird
Birds are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates constituting the class Aves (), characterised by feathers, toothless beaked jaws, the laying of hard-shelled eggs, a high metabolic rate, a four-chambered heart, and a strong yet lightweigh ...
s in the
icterid
Icterids () or New World blackbirds make up a family, the Icteridae (), of small to medium-sized, often colorful, New World passerine birds. Most species have black as a predominant plumage color, often enlivened by yellow, orange, or red. The ...
family. They are native to
North
North is one of the four compass points or cardinal directions. It is the opposite of south and is perpendicular to east and west. ''North'' is a noun, adjective, or adverb indicating Direction (geometry), direction or geography.
Etymology
T ...
and
South America
South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere at the northern tip of the continent. It can also be described as the southe ...
.
The genus was named and described by French ornithologist
Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot in 1816. 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 specimen ...
was subsequently designated as the
common grackle (''Quiscalus quiscula'') by English zoologist
George Robert Gray in 1840. The genus name comes from the specific name ''Gracula quiscula'' coined by Swedish naturalist
Carl Linnaeus
Carl Linnaeus (; 23 May 1707 – 10 January 1778), also known after his ennoblement in 1761 as Carl von Linné Blunt (2004), p. 171. (), was a Swedish botanist, zoologist, taxonomist, and physician who formalised binomial nomenclature, the ...
for the common grackle.
From where Linnaeus obtained the word is uncertain, but it may come from the
Taíno
The Taíno were a historic Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, indigenous people of the Caribbean whose culture has been continued today by Taíno descendant communities and Taíno revivalist communities. At the time of European contact in the ...
word ''quisqueya'', meaning "mother of all lands", for the island of
Hispaniola
Hispaniola (, also ; es, La Española; Latin and french: Hispaniola; ht, Ispayola; tnq, Ayiti or Quisqueya) is an island in the Caribbean that is part of the Greater Antilles. Hispaniola is the most populous island in the West Indies, and th ...
.
The genus contains six extant species and one extinct species:
References
External links
Quiscalus videos, photos and soundson the Internet Bird Collection
Bird genera
Taxa named by Louis Jean Pierre Vieillot
{{Icteridae-stub