Sericornis gularis Legge

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 : 130-131

Sericornis gularis Legge

Sericornis gularis Legge, 1896: 84 (Kent Group).

Now Sericornis frontalis frontalis ( Vigors and Horsfield, 1827) X S. frontalis flindersi S.A. White and Mellor, 1913. See Schodde and Mason, 1999: 165–171.

LECTOTYPE: AMNH 601399 , adult male, collected in the Kent Group , 39.27S, 147.20E ( USBGN, 1957b), Bass Strait Islands, Tasmania, Australia, in November 1890, by A.J. Campbell (no. 495). From the Mathews Collection (no. 18439) via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Legge’s description of gularis was based on ‘‘several specimens’’ collected in the Kent Group by members of the Field Naturalists’ Club of Victoria in November 1890 and sent to Legge by A.J. Campbell for identification. No type was designated in the original description, and all of the original series are syntypes. Three syntypes are in MV (W. Longmore, personal commun.).

Mathews (1922e: 37) noted: ‘‘The next year [1914] Mr. A.J. Campbell gave me the type of S. gularis Legge and I was enabled to recognise that it was a form of humilis …’’. Mathews cataloged this specimen as his number 18439 in May 1914; the date ‘‘17.3.14’’ that appears on Campbell’s label evidently refers to the date he sent the specimen to Mathews so that he could figure it in The Birds of Australia.

In addition to the field label and Mathews and Rothschild type labels, this specimen bears a yellow ‘‘Figured’’ label, indicating that it was figured in Mathews (1922e: pl. 457, middle right fig., opp. p. 31, text p. 32). There, Mathews, at the end of the description of the third adult male, noted ‘‘Figured. Collected on the Kent Group, in November 1890, and is the type of T. h. gularis (Legge) ’’, thereby designating it the lectotype.

Schodde and Mason (1999: 169–171) considered the population of the Kent Group a stabilized intergradient between S. frontalis frontalis and S. frontalis flindersi but mentioned the possibility that the paler, grayer coloration of Kent birds could be an ecophenotypic response to their scrubby environment. In del Hoyo et al. (2007: 582), the population from the Kent Group is included in S. frontalis flindersi .