Emblema picta ethelae 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 : 99

Emblema picta ethelae Mathews

Emblema picta ethelae Mathews, 1914a: 103 (Hermansburg [sic], MacDonnell Ranges).

Now Emblema pictum, Gould, 1852 . See Mayr et al., 1968: 354; Schodde and Mason, 1999: 743; Dickinson, 2003: 732; and Payne, 2010: 351.

SYNTYPES: AMNH 720305 (S.A. White no. 1339), adult male, AMNH 720306 (1340), adult male, AMNH 720307 (1341), male [immature], AMNH 720308 (1335), female, AMNH 720309 (1378), immature female, AMNH 720310 (1336), female?, all collected at Hermannsburg, 23.58S, 132.37E (Times atlas), MacDonnell Ranges, Northern Territory, Australia, on 30 August 1913, by S.A. White. From the Mathews Collection via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: In the original description, Mathews said only that the type was from Hermannsburg in the MacDonnell Ranges, and gave the range of the form as Central Australia. I found no further information in Mathews (1925: 182–187). White (1914: 437) reported finding the species common near Hermannsburg and near the Glen of Palms but shy and hard to collect. There are six specimens of Emblema pictum in AMNH from the MacDonnell Ranges that were originally in the Mathews Collection. Mathews cataloged few specimens after 1912 and these do not appear in his catalog. AMNH 720305 is marked ‘‘ Type of E.p. ethelae, A.A.R. Vol. II’’ This refers to the description in volume 2 of the Austral Avian Record and indicates that this is Mathews’ chosen type of ethelae, but apparently never published as such. It also bears a Rothschild type label, but Hartert did not publish a list of Mathews’ types of Estrildidae .

White put his entire collection at Mathews’ disposal and after Mathews had finished descriptions based on White’s specimens, part of the collection was returned to White. White’s collection is now in SAMA and there is one syntype of ethelae there: No. B54891, collected at Hermannsburg on 30 August 1913 (P. Horton, personal commun.).