Gallinago

Gallinago is a genus of birds in the wader family Scolopacidae, containing 18 species.

==Taxonomy== The name Gallinago was introduced by French zoologist Mathurin Jacques Brisson in 1760 as a subdivision of the genus Scolopax. Brisson did not use Carl Linnaeus's binomial system of nomenclature and although many of Brisson's genera had been adopted by ornithologists, his subdivision of genera were generally ignored. Instead, the erection of the genus Gallinago for the snipes was credited to German zoologist Carl Ludwig Koch in a book published in 1816. But in 1920 it was discovered that the German naturalist Johann Samuel Traugott Frenzel had erected the genus Capella for the snipes in 1801. As his publication antedated Koch's use of Gallinago, it took precedence. The American Ornithologists' Union switched to Capella in 1921 and in 1934, American ornithologist James L. Peters used Capella for the woodcocks in his influential Check-list of Birds of the World. This all changed in 1956, when the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature ruled that Gallinago Brisson 1760 should have priority for the genus, with the common snipe as the type species. The scientific name gallinago is Neo-Latin for a woodcock or snipe from Latin gallina, "hen", and the suffix -ago, "resembling".