Conopoderas caffra postrema Murphy and Mathews

LeCroy, M., 2008, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History. Part 7. Passeriformes: Sylviidae, Muscicapidae, Platysteiridae, Maluridae, Acanthizidae, Monarchidae, Rhipiduridae, And Petroicidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 313 (1), pp. 1-287 : 32

Conopoderas caffra postrema Murphy and Mathews

Conopoderas caffra postrema Murphy and Mathews, 1928: 17 (Hatutu Island, Marquesas Group).

Now Acrocephalus percernis postremus ( Murphy and Mathews, 1928) . See Watson et al., 1986a: 72, del Hoyo et al., 2006: 630, Cibois et al., 2007, and Cibois et al., 2008.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 195395 , adult male, collected on Hatuta’a (5 Hatutu) Island, 07.56S, 140.33W (Times Atlas), Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia, on 27 September 1922, by Rollo H. Beck on the Whitney South Sea Expedition (no. 5184).

COMMENTS: The AMNH number of the holotype was cited in the original description. The type series was said to include ‘‘Specimens from Hatutu collected during September and October, 1922’’. The following specimens are paratypes: AMNH 195396– 195420. Of these, AMNH 195397 and 195418 had been exchanged to the Rothschild Collection, and when AMNH purchased that collection, they were renumbered AMNH 594928 and 594929, respectively. I did not find AMNH 195402, 195406, and 195414 in the collection, and they may have been exchanged to other institutions without the catalog having been so marked.

Dickinson (2003: 585) listed postremus as a subspecies of A. caffer and referenced other treatments. Recent mtDNA studies by Cibois et al. (2007) included postremus in the northern Marquesas lineage of Acrocephalus , species A. percernis in their proposed classification.