Cisticola exilis mixta 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 : 45

Cisticola exilis mixta Mathews

Cisticola exilis mixta Mathews, 1912a: 343 (Queensland).

Now Cisticola exilis exilis ( Vigors and Horsfield, 1827) . See Lynes, 1930: 188–192, 648, and Schodde and Mason, 1999: 711.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 592980 , female, collected on Bartle Frere , 17.23S, 145.49E ( USBGN, 1957b), Queensland, Australia, on 19 May 1900, by E. Olive (no. 72). From the Mathews Collection (no. 5891) via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Mathews cited his catalog number of the holotype in the original description; he did not say how many specimens he examined but gave the range of the subspecies as Queensland. Four specimens from the Mathews Collection are considered paratypes: AMNH 592981 (Mathews no. 5892), male, collected on Bartle Frere on 19 May 1900 by E. Olive; AMNH 592986 (2151), male, AMNH 592987 (2152), male, and AMNH 592988 (2153), female, collected at Cairns in July 1908. Notes on the labels of the latter two specimens indicate that Lynes questioned the sex marked on the Mathews label. Mathews’ description was published in January 1912, and two additional specimens collected at Cairns by G. Schraeder in June 1911 could have been in his possession when mixta was named, but I was unable to find them in the Mathews catalog. AMNH 592985 is a specimen taken at Cairns on 14 January 1885 by T.H. Bowyer-Bower (no. 66) and bears Mathews number 16860. This specimen was not cataloged until 15 May 1913 and was reported on later ( Mathews, 1915c: 57). This specimen is not a paratype. Mathews (1942: 53) noted that the Bowyer-Bower collection was given to him by the collector’s mother.

Mathews (1913a: 210) specified the type locality of mixta as Bartle Frere, the collecting locality of the holotype. Lynes considered mixta to be intermediate between C. e. exilis and C. e. diminutus but closer to exilis ; Schodde and Mason (1999: 711) show Bartle Frere and Cairns within the range of diminutus.