Cyornis whitei montana Robinson and Kinnear

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 : 96-97

Cyornis whitei montana Robinson and Kinnear

Cyornis whitei montana Robinson and Kinnear, 1928: 244 (Mt. Liang Koebang, 2,000 feet, Central Borneo).

Now Cyornis banyumas montanus Robinson and Kinnear, 1928 . See Smythies, 2000: 548.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 605305 , adult male, collected on Liang Kubung Range (5 Mt. Liang Koebang), 2000 ft, 00.30N, 113.05E (BirdLife International, 2001: 2603), Kalimantan, Indonesia, on 30 April 1894, by J. Büttikofer (no. 1157, Kat. no. 6). From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: In the original description, Robinson and Kinnear designated as type of montana an adult male collected on Mt. Liang Koebang and in the Rothschild Collection. The above specimen is the only such male that came to AMNH with the Rothschild Collection ; ‘‘ Type of Cyornis whitei montana Robinson & Kinnear’ ’ is written on the reverse of Büttikoffer’s label, and the specimen bears a Rothschild type label. The description appeared too late to have been included in any of Hartert’s Rothschild type lists. There are two paratypes in AMNH: AMNH 605306 , female, Liang Kubung Range, 18 March 1894, also collected by Büttikofer (no. 667, Kat. no. 10) ; and AMNH 605307 , female, Mt. Kinabalu , 3000 ft, 24 February 1887, collect- ed by J. Whitehead (no. 1011), wing measurement 67 mm. This latter paratype was listed by Sharpe and Whitehead (1889: 205) as Siphia elegans . The Dulit specimen is not in AMNH .

Büttikofer (1900: 197) compared his 12 specimens from the Liang Kubung Range with the type of Schwaneria caerulata Bonaparte, 1857 and attributed them to that form, misspelling the name as ‘‘ S. coeruleata ’’. While he realized that there were plumage differences, he did not introduce a new name because Bonaparte’s type, which he examined, was slightly immature and in poor condition, and he lacked additional comparative material. Robinson and Kinnear (1928: 244) later named this altitudinally circumscribed subspecies montana , and included it in the species C. whitei .

Some authors writing about this subspecies since Watson et al. (1986b: 367) have usually referred to this subspecies as C. banyumas coeruleata ( Büttikofer, 1900) . But as E. Dickinson (personal commun.) has pointed out to me, Büttikofer’s spelling ‘‘ coeruleata ’’ is merely an incorrect subsequent spelling of Bonaparte’s caerulata and as such is unavailable (ICZN, 1999: 42–43, Art. 33.3). Watson et al. (1986b: 367) considered coeruleata a valid name and Cyornis whitei montana a synonym, implying that Robinson and Kinnear had introduced it as a replacement name. However, Robinson and Kinnear did not offer montana as a replacement name; by quoting their new form as ‘‘ Siphia caeruleata [sic] Büttikofer (nec Bp.)’’, they established that Büttikofer’s birds differed from Bonaparte’s and were unnamed.