''Attagis '' is a genus of seedsnipe, a

South America South America is a continent entirely in the Western Hemisphere and mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a considerably smaller portion in the Northern Hemisphere. It can also be described as the southern Subregion#Americas, subregion o ...

n family of small gregarious

wader 245px, A flock of Red_knot.html" ;"title="Dunlins and Red knot">Dunlins and Red knots Waders or shorebirds are birds of the order Charadriiformes commonly found wikt:wade#Etymology 1, wading along shorelines and mudflats in order to foraging, ...

s which have adapted to a vegetarian diet. These birds look superficially like

partridge A partridge is a medium-sized Galliformes, galliform bird in any of several genera, with a wide Indigenous (ecology), native distribution throughout parts of Europe, Asia and Africa. Several species have been introduced to the Americas. They ar ...

s in structure and bill shape. They have short legs and long wings. Their 2-3 eggs are laid in a shallow scrape on the ground. The genus was erected by the French ornithologists Isidore Saint-Hilaire and

René Lesson René Primevère Lesson (20 March 1794 – 28 April 1849) was a French surgery, surgeon, natural history, naturalist, ornithologist, and herpetologist. Biography Lesson was born at Rochefort, Charente-Maritime, Rochefort, and entered the Naval ...

in 1831 with the rufous-bellied seedsnipe (''Attagis gayi'') as the

type species In International_Code_of_Zoological_Nomenclature, 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 spe ...

. The name ''Attagis'' is the word used for a game bird in

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

texts. It probably referred to the black francolin (''Francolinus francolinus'').

Species

The genus contains two species: These are the larger of the four seedsnipe species.

References

* ''Shorebirds'' by Hayman, Marchant and Prater {{Taxonbar, from=Q2220919 Bird genera Birds of the Andes Taxa named by René Lesson