Curruca orphea griseocapilla A.E. Brehm

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 : 72-73

Curruca orphea griseocapilla A.E. Brehm

Curruca orphea griseocapilla A.E. Brehm, 1857: 464 ( Spain).

Now Sylvia hortensis hortensis (Gmelin, 1789) . See Hartert, 1918a: 31, and del Hoyo et al., 2006: 697.

SYNTYPES: AMNH 455530 , male, 18 July 1856 ; AMNH 455531 , female immature, 21 June 1856 ; and AMNH 455541 , female, 12 July 1856, all collected at Jativa , 39.00N, 00.32W (Times Atlas), Valencia, Spain. From the Brehm Collection via the Rothschild Collection .

COMMENTS: Hartert (1918a: 31) considered specimens now numbered AMNH 455539 and 455540 to be syntypes of Curruca vidali , Curruca caniceps , and C. orphea griseocapilla , but see above for discussion of the first two names. A.E. Brehm (1857: 464) noted that his new subspecies, griseocapilla, was the gray-headed form, found in Catalonia and Valencia, and that he had several times collected mated pairs. However, he did not further identify his specimens or designate a type; therefore, all of his gray-headed specimens from those localities are syntypes. Because the original field label has been removed from AMNH 455541, there is some question as to the collector; however, the locality and date are consistent with its having been collected by A.E. Brehm.

In addition to the above three specimens, there are in AMNH a further five collected by A.E. Brehm in Masneu in Catalonia, but these are not of the gray-headed form.

A.E. Brehm’s name Curruca orphea griseocapilla appeared in the last half of his paper on his Spanish collection and was published in 1857 ( LeCroy, 2003: 24).

Shirihai et al. (2001: 157, 167–168) considered S. hortensis and S. crassirostris to be allospecies of the superspecies hortensis .