Cisticola hunteri immaculata van Someren

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 : 36

Cisticola hunteri immaculata van Someren Cisticola hunteri masaba Lynes

Cisticola hunteri immaculata van Someren, 1922: 216 (Bumasifa, Mt. Elgon) .

Now Cisticola hunteri Shelley, 1889 . See Lynes, 1930: 336–344, 637, and Urban et al., 1997: 153– 154.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 593607 , adult male, collected at Bumasifwa (5 Bumasifa), 01.11N, 34.22E ( Polhill, 1988: 29), Mount Elgon, Uganda, on 24 March 1916, by V.G.L. van Someren. From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: In the original description, van Someren designated as the type a specimen in the Rothschild Collection bearing the above data. AMNH 593607 is the only van Someren specimen of this taxon that came to AMNH with the Rothschild Collection. He listed a type series of two males (probably including the holotype), two females, and one juvenile.

Lynes (1930: 343) noted that C. h. immaculata was preoccupied by Hemipteryx immaculata Hartlaub, 1866 5 Cisticola ayresii , and he renamed it C. h. masaba. Both names are now in the synonymy of monotypic C. hunteri ( Watson et al., 1986a: 91) . Apparently Hartert overlooked van Someren’s name in his lists of types in the Rothschild Collection, but the specimen does bear a Rothschild type label and the van Someren label is marked ‘‘Subsp. nov.’’ in his hand. The two female paratypes are in RMCA ( Louette et al., 2002: 47).