Cisticola exilis alexandrae Mathews, 1912

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 : 44

Cisticola exilis alexandrae Mathews

Cisticola exilis alexandrae Mathews, 1912a: 343 (Northern Territory (Alexandra)).

Now Cisticola exilis alexandrae Mathews, 1912 . See Lynes, 1930: 195–197, 616, and Schodde and Mason, 1999: 711–712.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 593112 , adult female, collected at Alexandria (5 Alexandra), 19.00S, 136.42E (Times Atlas), Northern Territory, Australia, on 24 July 1905, by Wilfred Stalker. From the Mathews Collection (no. 2139) via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Mathews gave his catalog number of the holotype in the original description. Lynes (1930: 616) questioned the July date, stating that while this specimen is in summer dress, other July birds are in winter dress. Whittell (1954: 680–681) report- ed that Stalker collected in the Alexandria area from January 1905 to January 1906. Ingram (1907: 407), in his report on this collection, listed only this single female, collected on 24 July 1905, and noted that it was markedly paler than other specimens of C. exilis , but he refrained from naming it as he had only the single specimen. A spot-check of specimens collected by Stalker, as listed by Ingram (1907), showed that the numbers on Stalker’s specimens (in this case 552) refer to the number of that species in Mathews (1908a) and must have been added later. Therefore, it is not possible to confirm the date of collecting from numbers on Stalker’s specimens.

Stalker was listed as William Stalker in Ingram (1907) and by Whittell (1954: 680– 681); however, his given name was Wilfred ( Ogilvie-Grant, 1915: vi).