Notiomystes (sic) cincta

Mary, 2011, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 9. Passeriformes: Zosteropidae And Meliphagidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2011 (348), pp. 1-193 : 118-119

Notiomystes (sic) cincta hautura Mathews

Notiomystes (sic) cincta hautura Mathews, 1935: 159 (Little Barrier Island).

Now Notiomystis cincta DuBus. See Salomonsen, 1967: 401 , Dickinson, 2003: 431, Driskell et al., 2007, Higgins and Christidis, 2009: 256–257, and Checklist Committee, 2010: 284.

LECTOTYPE: AMNH 697356 , adult male, collected on Little Barrier Island , New Zealand, in 1885. From the Spencer Collection (no. 9) via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Mathews (1935: 159) described this form, based on 15 adults in male plumage from the Rothschild Collection but already in New York in 1935, and did not designate a type in the original description, saying only ‘‘Type-In the American Museum of Natural History, New York. Rothschild Collection.’’ AMNH 697356 has been designated the lectotype by Angehr (2011: 68) as part of his on-going study of the species. This specimen is among a group of seven with the most complete data of any of the 15 specimens and has a wing measurement of 100 mm, which is near the average of 101 cited by Mathews for hautura.

Paralectotypes: all from the Rothschild Collection and all adult males (by plumage, if sex not noted), collected on Little Barrier Island, New Zealand, AMNH 697350 , AMNH 697352 , AMNH 697353 , AMNH 697357 , AMNH 697358 , all collected in 1885, from the Spencer Collection (nos. 1, 3, 5, 10, 11, respectively) ; AMNH 697359 , collected in 1886, from the Spencer Collection (no. 11A) ; AMNH 697360 , undated, from the Mathews Collection with label marked purchased from (the dealer) Gerrard ; AMNH 697362 , AMNH 697363 , AMNH 697364 , AMNH 697365 , undated, with the Rothschild label marked as from the Spencer Collection ; AMNH 697369 , AMNH 697370 , undated, no indication of Rothschild’s source ; AMNH 697371 , undated, collected by Andreas Reischek, from the W. Buller Collection (no. 9c) .

Of these paralectotypes, AMNH 697360 bears a note on the label that it was figured by Lodge. This refers to a painting done by George Edward Lodge for a proposed edition of Sir Walter Buller’s Birds of New Zealand that was never published. Much later, Fleming (1982) published these paintings with accompanying text ; this specimen appears as the upper figure in Fleming’s plate 83, opposite p. 358. AMNH 697363 is marked ‘‘ Type ? pogoma’’ in what may be Mathews’ hand, but I have found no indication that he ever introduced the name pogoma. AMNH 697371 was purchased by Rothschild from Buller and is noted by Buller as specimen ‘‘9c’’ in the annotated and interleaved copy of Buller’s 1882 Manual of the Birds of New Zealand held in the Department of Ornithology Archives, AMNH. Rothschild himself had added specimen ‘‘9d’’ to the list in this annotated volume and noted that the specimen was a male specimen bought by Palmer in 1889. There is no way to tell whether this refers to paralectotype AMNH 697369 or 697370, as the labels are not annotated. Angehr (1984: 305), in his detailed study of the provenance of Stitchbird specimens, came to the conclusion that probably all of these specimens from Little Barrier Island had been collected by Andreas Reischek.

Bartle and Tennyson (2009) have recently published an important paper on the history of the Buller collections of New Zealand birds, including a summary of Bartle’s research on Rothschild’s purchases of specimens from Buller ( Bartle and Tennyson, 2009: 84–85). As a result of Bartle’s work at AMNH in 1982, we have been able to use effectively the interleaved copy of Buller’s ‘‘Manual’’ in our Archives.

Mathews gave the range and mean wing measurements for all 15 of the specimens, writing individual measurements on the specimen labels. My measurements [96–108] agree very closely with those made by Mathews [96–107], and there seems to be no doubt that he borrowed all of these specimens and had them in hand when he wrote the description. The specimens are mostly poorly made and some measurements had to be made on the left wing. Females and immature males were not described and have no measurements written on the labels, so one can assume they were not loaned to Mathews.

The Stitchbird was long included in the genus Pogonornis G.R. Gray, 1846 , a name which when found to be preoccupied by Pogonornis Billberg, 1828 , was replaced by Notiomystis Richmond ( Richmond, 1908: 634) . Ewen et al. (2006) analyzed the degree of phylogenetic uniqueness of Notiomystis cincta and Callaeas cinerea . Driskell et al. (2007), based on the results of their molecular and morphological studies, found Notiomystis to be most closely related to the Callaeidae and introduced Notiomystidae , type genus Notiomystis Richmond, 1908 , as a new family of New Zealand endemics. Higgins and Christidis (2009: 256) and Checklist Committee (2010: 284) treat the species as monotypic.