Microligea montana Chapman

LeCroy, Mary, 2013, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 11. Passeriformes: Parulidae, Drepanididae, Vireonidae, Icteridae, Fringillinae, Carduelinae, Estrildidae, And Viduinae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2013 (381), pp. 1-155 : 20

Microligea montana Chapman

Microligea montana Chapman, 1917a: 330 (Mt. Tina, Prov Azua, Santo Domingo, W.I.).

Now Xenoligea montana (Chapman, 1917) . See Wetmore and Swales, 1931: 396–397; Hellmayr, 1935: 425–426; Lowery and Monroe, 1968: 79; Lovette and Bermingham, 2002; Keith et al., 2003: 201; Dickinson, 2003: 768; and Curson, 2010b: 800.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 164620 , adult male, collected on Loma Tina (5 Mount Tina), 18.46N, 70.42W ( Keith et al., 2003: 238), La Vega, Dominican Republic (5 Santo Domingo), on 15 January 1917, by Rollo H. Beck (no. 6978) on the Brewster-Sanford Expedition.

COMMENTS: In the original description, Chapman cited Beck’s unique field number of the holotype and said that Beck collected a large series on mounts Tina and Rucilla. Paratypes are: Loma Tina, AMNH 164614– 146619 , 164621–164642 , 10 males, 16 females, two sex ?; Loma Rucilla, AMNH 164643 , male ; Mount Rucilla , AMNH

164644, male; La Canita, AMNH 164645, male, all collected in January and February (one in early March), 1917, by Beck. Of these, AMNH 164614, 164615, 164630, and 164634 were exchanged with W.F.H. Rosenberg in September 1921; AMNH 164616 and 164642 were exchanged with Rothschild in May 1921 and when they were returned when that collection came to AMNH in 1932, they were renumbered 507569 and 507570, respectively; AMNH 164622, 164624, 164633, and 164641 were exchanged with BMNH in May 1921; AMNH 164623 was exchanged with UMMZ in September 1984; and AMNH 164626 and 164637 were exchanged with FMNH in November 1922. I did not find AMNH 164629 and 164643 in the collection and they were perhaps exchanged without any notation in the catalog. AMNH 164635 was originally identified and cataloged as Microligea montana , but it is a specimen of Microligea palustris . Specimens of M. montana collected by Beck later in 1917 in Haiti were not included in the description.

Wetmore and Swales (1931: 18–19) carefully reconstructed Beck’s itinerary in the Dominican Republic based on Beck’s journal in the Archives, Department of Ornithology, AMNH, and noted ( Wetmore and Swales, 1931: 4, map opp. p. 4) that Loma Tina and Loma Rucilla are among the highest mountains in central Dominican Republic, inland from Tubano. They ( Wetmore and Swales, 1931: 396–397) incorporated Beck’s collection in their publication on the birds of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, but the paratypes noted above as exchanged to other institutions in 1921 and 1922 were not available to them.

The affinities of Xenoligea are uncertain; the references above summarize the various treatments. It is given as a genus incertae sedis by Lowery and Monroe (1968: 79) and Dickinson (2003: 768) and is treated as such here.