Cisticola floweri Hartert

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 : 38

Cisticola floweri Hartert

Cisticola floweri Hartert, 1910d: 12 (Sennaar and Barankwa on the Blue Nile).

Now Cisticola ruficeps scotoptera (Sundevall, 1850) . See Hartert, 1920: 465, Lynes, 1930: 632, 662, and Urban et al., 1997: 188.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 594322 , unsexed adult, collected at Sennaar, 13.31N, 33.38E

(Times Atlas), Sudan, 28 July 1909, by S.S. Flower (no. S.F. 870). From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Hartert gave Flower’s unique field number of the holotype in the original description. He did not say how many specimens he examined, but because he only mentioned the two localities in the original description, I have considered AMNH 594523, the Barankwa specimen labeled Cisticola floweri by Hartert, the only paratype. AMNH 594324, collected by Flower in September 1907 at Roseirea, was originally identified as S. erythrogenys and later identified as Cisticola ruficeps scotoptera juvenile. I have not considered this a paratype. I have no way of knowing when two specimens collected by Butler at Gedaref in 1901 came into Rothschild’s possession, but they were never labeled C. floweri by Hartert nor was the locality mentioned, and I have not considered them paratypes. They are the two specimens annotated by O. Neumann as being like the ‘‘types of ruficeps ’’ ( Hartert, 1920: 465) and are AMNH 594320 and 594321. AMNH 594320 also bears two large green labels affixed by Lynes, on which the director of the Franfurt Museum commented that the specimen was very similar to the type of C. ruficeps scotoptera , held in that institution.