Sylvia aequinoctialis Latham, 1790

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 : 30

Sylvia aequinoctialis Latham

Sylvia aequinoctialis Latham, 1790: 553 ( Christmas Island, Pacific Ocean).

Now Acrocephalus aequinoctialis aequinoctialis ( Latham, 1790) . See Murphy and Mathews, 1929: 1, Watson et al., 1986a: 70, del Hoyo et al., 2006: 628–629, and Cibois et al., 2008.

Neotype: AMNH 190543 , adult male, collected on Kiritimati (5 Christmas) Island, 02.00N, 157.30W (Times Atlas), Line Islands, Republic of Kiribati, on 12 February 1921, by Rollo Beck on the Whitney South Sea Expedition (no. 541).

COMMENTS: Murphy and Mathews (1929: 1–2) found it necessary to designate a neotype for Sylvia aequinoctialis Latham when they revised the ‘‘ Conopoderas ’’ warblers collected by the Whitney South Sea Expedition in Polynesia. They stated, ‘‘Although this warbler was named one hundred and forty years ago and has since been collected on two or more occasions, no specimen appears to have found its way into a natural history museum previous to the series obtained by Messrs. Beck and Quayle of the Whitney Expedition. The species proves to be of rather unexpected appearance, being of a gray and white cast and equally different from the yellow representatives of Conopoderas of the Marquesas and Society Groups on the one hand, and the brownish races of the Tuamotus on the other.’’ The locality given by Latham (1790: 553) was ‘‘Christi Natalis’’ (5 Christmas Island in the Pacific Ocean).