Acanthorhynchus superciliosus stirlingi

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 : 156-157

[ Acanthorhynchus superciliosus stirlingi Mathews]

Acanthorhynchus superciliosus stirlingi Mathews, 1924: 348 (Stirling Ranges).

Now Acanthorhynchus superciliosus Gould, 1837 . See Salomonsen, 1967: 438, Schodde and Mason, 1999: 328, Christidis and Boles, 2008: 185–191, and Higgins et al., 2008: 583.

COMMENTS: Mathews description only said, ‘‘Differs from the form from Perth in having a black head,’’ which description is apparently taken from Milligan’s (1903: 12) statement, quoted in Mathews’ (1924: 348) ‘‘Then again, we secured several specimens of the White-browed Spinebill ( Acanthorhynchus superciliosus ) and in every male specimen the head was black, or almost so, not the greyish-olive of the mantle and back.’’ Milligan considered this species to be one of the ‘‘perplexities’’ associated with his trip to the Stirling Range and noted that many of his specimens from that trip ‘‘met with a misadventure after their arrival in Perth,’’ that was not otherwise explained.

There are two adult male and one juvenile male specimens in AMNH collected by F.L. Whitlock in the Stirling Range in July and August 1911, and while the adult males have the head darker than the back, none of them has a truly black head and there is no indication on any of them that Mathews considered them type material. According to R. Johnstone (personal commun.), the WAM has one specimen collected by Milligan in the Stirling Range, which also does not have a black head. Perhaps the others met with a ‘‘misadventure.’’

By 1924, when this form was named, at least part of the Mathews Collection had already been incorporated into the Rothschild Collection, and Mathews seemed more and more inclined to produce names related to statements made to him by his corps of correspondents, apparently in a hurry to ensure that the names appeared in his Birds of Australia, and often without any specimens at hand to serve as types. In some of these cases, specimens collected by the person quoted may show the characters given by Mathews and may serve as types of the name, but that does not seem to be the case for this form.