Parus major excelsus Buvry, 1857

Pachycephalidae, Aegithalidae, Remizidae, Paridae, Sittidae, Neosittidae, Certhiidae, Rhabdornithidae, Climacteridae, Dicaeidae, Pardalotidae, Nectariniidae, And & Lecroy, Mary, 2010, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 8. Passeriformes:, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2010 (333), pp. 1-178 : 73

Parus major excelsus Buvry

Parus major excelsus Buvry, 1857: 194 (Province de Constatine, Algérie).

Now Parus major excelsus Buvry, 1857 . See Gosler and Clement, 2007: 739–741.

PROBABLE SYNTYPE: AMNH 455807, adult male, collected at Beni Terrah, Djebel Aurès, 35.14N, 06.10E (USBGN, 1972), Constantine Province, Algeria, on 30 January 1856, by Leopold Buvry. From the Brehm Collection via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: The original description by Buvry noted that excelsus was a manuscript name of C.L. Brehm; even so, the above specimen collected by Buvry in Algeria is labeled eximius by Brehm. No specimen labeled excelsus by Brehm came to AMNH. On the reverse of the Rothschild label of AMNH 455807 is a note by Hartert: ‘‘Evidently cotype of P.m. excelsus, name excelsus should probably have been eximius! Journ. f. Orn. 1857 p. 194.’’ It was labeled a male by Brehm, not by Buvry.

Buvry’s (1857: 62) letter documenting his trip to Constantine Province, Algeria, was printed in three sections and was dated ‘‘ Bona, im April 1856.’’ His travels had apparently taken place between April 1855 (the date of his previous letter to the editor of Journal für Ornithologie) and April 1856. Although the type locality is considered to be Nrakta el abbia Forest, the locality section under which his new name appears, Buvry (1857: 194) did not say how many specimens he had or whether some came from other localities he visited. Because the above specimen was collected by Buvry during his expedition to Constantine Province, I think Hartert was correct in his label notation even though he did not mention this specimen in any of his publications on types in the Rothschild Collection. I have added it to the AMNH type collection and labeled it a probable syntype.