Charaxes (Charaxes) cithaeron kennethi Poulton, 1926

Liseki, Steven D. & Vane-Wright, Richard I., 2015, Butterflies (Lepidoptera: Papilionoidea) of Mount Kilimanjaro: Nymphalidae subfamilies Libytheinae, Danainae, Satyrinae and Charaxinae, Journal of Natural History 50, pp. 865-904 : 888-889

Charaxes (Charaxes) cithaeron kennethi Poulton, 1926

Henning 1989: 184 (2 figs). SI: Figure 23e – h.

Forewing length: male 40 – 48.5 mm [mean (n = 13) 45.26 mm, SD = 2.160]; female 45.5 – 54 mm [mean (n = 5) 49.72 mm, SD = 2.538]. van Someren (1964, p. 231) gave male forewing length as 44 – 47 mm, female 47 – 51.

Note: the separation of C. c. nairobicus van Son, 1953, from subspecies kennethi appears tenuous. Females vary in width of the hindwing lilac band or ‘ window ’.

Records

Northeastern and southeastern parts of Tanzania, including the Mbulu, Nguru and Ukaguru mountains and the Udzungwa rift, only rarely occurring above 800 m ( Kielland 1990, p. 99). Henning (1989, p. 184) notes it from the Usambaras, Morogoro, Lindi area, foothills of Kilimanjaro (including Moshi and Arusha – most likely based on van Someren 1964, p. 232). Cordeiro (1990, p. 34) records it from Lake Manyara National Park. The BMNH has males from the slopes of Kilimanjaro and Moshi, a pair from Rau forest, and a female from Taveta. Two males in OUMNH are from Kibosa, western slopes of Kilimanjaro, c. 5000 ft, collected by Rogers, 1 November 1905 [we have been unable to locate ‘ Kibosa ’]. Not encountered by Liseki (2009), this taxon is included here as a member of the lower slopes fauna. Beyond Tanzania it occurs in the Kenya coast area. More widely this east African species is found from Kenya to South Africa with, in addition to kennethi, localized subspecies recognized from Zambia, central Kenya and Malawi ( Ackery et al. 1995, p. 438).