Zosterops australasiae edwini Mathews

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 : 28-29

Zosterops australasiae edwini Mathews

Zosterops australasiae edwini Mathews, 1923b: 36 (Carnarvon, West Australia).

Now Zosterops lateralis chloronotus Gould, 1841 . See Mees, 1969: 12–29, Schodde and Mason, 1999: 687–691, and van Balen, 2008: 467–468.

SYNTYPES: AMNH 700904 , adult male, 2 October 1913 ; AMNH 700905 , female, 10 August 1916 ; AMNH 700906 , female, 6 August 1911, all collected at Carnarvon , 24.51S, 113.45E (Times Atlas), Western Australia, Australia, by Thomas Carter. From the Mathews Collection via the Rothschild Collection .

COMMENTS: In the original description, Mathews said that his type was from Carnarvon , West Australia, but gave no information on how many specimens he had ; however, by 1923, when this form was named, Mathews’ collection was complete. I found only one of the above specimens in Mathews’ catalog, Mathews no. 9747, with date 6 August 1911. A second specimen was cataloged there, Mathews no. 9748, a male collected at Carnarvon on 27 August 1911, but this specimen did not come to AMNH and there is no way of knowing whether Mathews exchanged it before naming edwini .

All three of the specimens listed above bear Carter’s original label and a Rothschild Collection label printed ‘‘Ex. Coll. G.M. Mathews,’’ but there is no indication on the labels that they should have type status. Z. a. edwini was one of the subspecies hurriedly named by Mathews in 1923, and it is not apparent that he had his own collection at hand when he described it. Mathews (1923a: 160) wrote that Ashby had ‘‘recently confirmed my conclusion that the Carnarvon form was separable, writing ‘The birds at Geraldton are smaller and brighter in tint than birds observed at Perth’.’’ However, this observation by Ashby (1921: 136) was published before Mathews named edwini. Despite the fact that the name apparently refers to Edwin Ashby, the type of the name is from Carnarvon and is not one of Ashby’s specimens. So it is reasonable to assume that the three specimens from Carnarvon that were in Mathews’ collection may be the ones Mathews had in mind when he named edwini. They had not previously been included in the AMNH type collection.