Xanthotis polygramma kuehni Hartert

Mary, 2011, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 9. Passeriformes: Zosteropidae And Meliphagidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2011 (348), pp. 1-193 : 106-107

Xanthotis polygramma kuehni Hartert

Xanthotis polygramma kuehni Hartert, 1930b: 49 (Misol) .

Now Xanthotis polygrammus kuehni Hartert, 1930 . See Mees, 1965: 192, Salomonsen, 1967: 388, Dickinson, 2003: 431, and Higgins et al., 2008: 688–689.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 696238 , female, collected on Misool (5 Misol) Island, 01.52S, 130.10E ( USBGN, 1982a), Papua Province, Indonesia, on 21 January 1900, by Heinrich Kühn. From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: In the original description, Hartert designated as type a female collected on Misool on 21 January 1900. Unfortunately, the Rothschild type label was tied on the female specimen collected on 22 January 1900 ( AMNH 696237 ), and because this form was described too late to be included in any of Hartert’s lists of types in the Rothschild Collection, no correction of the date was made. It could have been simply a typographical error, but because there is a female specimen collected on 21 January, I have assumed the label to have been put on the wrong bird. AMNH 696237 has always been considered the type ; I have added a label explaining the error and have left it with the types. An AMNH type label has now been attached to AMNH 696238 . The five specimens listed by Hartert as in the Rothschild Collection are in AMNH and the four paratypes, all collected by Kühn on Misool, are: AMNH 696237 , female, 22 January 1900 (Rothschild type label erroneously attached to this specimen) ; AMNH 696239 , immature male, 18 January 1900 ; AMNH 696240 , female, 8 February 1900 ; AMNH 696241 , immature male, 19 January 1900. Hartert (1930b: 49) mentioned that there were four specimens of kuehni in BMNH, and they are also paratypes .

Gray (1862: 429) described Ptilotis polygramma based on A.R. Wallace’s specimens from Waigeo Island, and Wallace’s specimens from Misool were originally included in polygramma . Hartert (1930b: 48–49), deciding that the Misool birds differed from those from Waigeo, separated them as X. p. kuehni . Mees (1965: 192) found that Misool birds agreed with those from the Vogelkop and synonymized kuehni with poikilosternos. Mees (1965: 192), however, was in error when he said that Mayr and Meyer de Schauensee (1939b) had listed a specimen collected by Ripley on Misool as poikilosternos. Ripley did not collect this species on Misool when he visited there in 1937–1938 on the Denison-Crockett Expedition ( Mayr and Meyer de Schauensee, 1939b: 152), only on Salawatti (p. 156), where it was identified as poikilosternos. A nestling, identified as poikilosternos, was collected on the Vogelkop on the same expedition ( Mayr and Meyer de Schauensee, 1939a: 141). Later, Ripley (1964: 70) again visited Misool and collected two male specimens of X. polygrammus , which he identified as belonging to the subspecies kuehni .

The five specimens of kuehni in AMNH all appear to me to be immature, although Hartert (1930b: 49) considered two of the specimens adult. Mayr’s single specimen from the Arfak Mountains on the Vogelkop is also immature and there is little other material of poikilosternos from the Vogelkop in AMNH; Mees (1965: 192) did not comment on the age of his specimens. Salomonsen (1967: 388), Dickinson (2003: 431), and Higgins et al. (2008: 688) all recognized kuehni .