Donacola castaneothorax northi Mathews

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 : 124

[ Donacola castaneothorax northi Mathews ]

Donacola castaneothorax northi Mathews, 1923: 40 (North Queensland).

Now Lonchura castaneothorax castaneothorax (Gould, 1837) . See Mayr et al., 1968: 384; and Schodde and Mason, 1999: 771–772.

COMMENTS: This is another case of Mathews rushing to publish names so they could be included in Mathews (1925: 196– 200). Mathews (1925: 199–200) had decided that Cairns, usually considered the type locality of Gould’s name, was unlikely to have been a source of specimens as early as 1837, thus leaving Cairns birds without a name. In the original description of northi, Mathews (1923: 40) merely said that the type was from North Queensland, but Mathews (1925: 197) listed the type locality as ‘‘Cairns, North Queensland,’’ and the implication in his discussion ( Mathews, 1925: 200) is that Mathews intended to provide the Cairns birds with a name. There are five Mathews specimens in AMNH with Cairns as the collecting locality, but none of their labels has any indication that Mathews intended them as types and none of them shows the characters given for northi: ‘‘paler in general coloration,’’ ‘‘rump not so reddish-brown,’’ and ‘‘band on the breast is darker.’’