Erythrura trichroa macgillivrayi Mathews, 1914

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 : 111

Erythrura trichroa macgillivrayi Mathews

Erythrura trichroa macgillivrayi Mathews, 1914a: 103 (Claudie River, North Queensland).

Now Erythrura trichroa macgillivrayi Mathews, 1914 . See Mayr et al., 1968: 364, Schodde and Mason, 1999: 765–766, Dickinson, 2003: 733, and Payne, 2010: 348–349.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 722120 , adult male, collected on Lloyd Island (not Claudie River), northeast Queensland, Australia, on 11 January (not February) 1914, by William R. Maclennan (not William D.K. Macgillivray). From the Mathews Collection (no. 18443) via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: In the original description, the type was said to be from the Claudie River and collected by William Macgillivray in February 1914. Mathews got almost every detail concerning this specimen wrong. Macgillivray (1917 –1918: 73, 208) reported on the trip his group made to northern Queensland, specifically noting that the the new Erythrura trichroa was collected on 11 January on Lloyd Island, 12.46S, 143.24E (USBGN, 1957), and that it was secured by William Maclennan. The holotype bears, in addition to a tag that was partly filled in by Mathews with the incorrect data, Mathews and Rothschild type labels and a ‘‘Figured’’ label, indicating that it was the model for Mathews (1925: 208, pl. 567, lower fig., opp. p. 208), where it is said to be the type of Erythrura trichroa macgillivrayi . Mathews (1925: 204–207) erected the genus Chloromunia for the species and it is listed under that name. It bears a Mathews catalog number, ‘‘18443,’’ although this was nowhere mentioned.

After his entry of Kemp’s collection made in 1913 and cataloged in January 1914, Mathews wrote in his catalog ‘‘End of collection.’’ Many of the specimens cataloged later on the last four pages of his catalog were specimens he acquired from Macgillivray, probably on a trip Mathews made to Australia around that time, and most of them are types of Mathews’ names, although not so marked in the catalog.

In Mathews’ publication (1925: 208, and pl. 567 on opp. page), the upper figure in pl. 567 is labeled a female, but both figured birds listed in the text are males. This was apparently a typographical error in the text, as Mathews had a second specimen of macgillivaryi that he did not otherwise mention. It is AMNH 722121, female, from Kuranda, collected 3 April 1913, collector not noted (but it may have come from the Dodds, who lived at Kuranda and sent Mathews specimens from time to time). It also bears a ‘‘Figured’’ label. I did not find it entered in Mathews’ catalog, so he probably acquired it sometime between its collection in 1913 and its depiction in 1925.

Most authors have considered macgillivrayi to be a synonym of E. t. sigillifera, but Schodde and Mason (1999: 765–766) suggested that because the Australian form is so poorly known and geographically isolated, it seemed best to recognize macgillivrayi until further specimens permit a thorough analysis. The two specimens mentioned by Schodde and Mason are in the CSIRO collection and did not include this type (R. Schodde, personal commun.), which was the first confirmed occurrence of the species in Australia.