Pyromelana franciscana pusilla Hartert

Lecroy, Mary, 2014, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 12. Passeriformes: Ploceidae, Sturnidae, Buphagidae, Oriolidae, Dicruridae, Callaeidae, Grallinidae, Corcoracidae, Artamidae, Cracticidae, Ptilonorhynchidae, Cnemophilidae, Paradisaeidae, And Corvidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2014 (393), pp. 1-165 : 28-29

Pyromelana franciscana pusilla Hartert

Pyromelana franciscana pusilla Hartert, 1901c: 71 (Lake Stephanie) .

Now Euplectes franciscanus (Isert, 1789) . See Zedlitz, 1916: 26–28; Hartert, 1919: 144; Moreau and Greenway, 1962: 67–68; Craig, 1993a: 87–88; Dickinson, 2003: 725; Fry and Keith, 2004: 215–217; Ash and Atkins, 2009: 343; and Craig, 2010: 143–144.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 726383 , adult male, collected on 7 June 1895, at Chew Bahir swamp (= Lake Stephanie), 04.40N, 36.55E ( Ash and Atkins, 2009: 406), Ethiopia, by A. Donaldson Smith (no. 655). From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: The male specimen from Chew Bahir swamp was designated the type by Hartert in the original description. In addition, he included a female with eggs paired with the above male and a male from Barri, Ethiopia (= Central Somaliland ) both collected by Donaldson Smith. Paratypes are, with Donaldson Smith’s field numbers in parentheses: Chew Bahir swamp, AMNH 726384 (654), female, 7 June 1895 ; Barri, AMNH 726384 (485), adult male, 11 January 1895 .

Hartert’s pusillus is often recognized as a subspecies of Euplectes orix , but as long ago as Zedlitz (1916: 27) the variation was believed to be individual, and recent molecular data have not supported treatment of franciscanus as a subspecies of E. orix ( Craig, 2010: 143) .