Arrenga blighi Holdsworth

Mary, Croy, History, Bulletin Of The American Museum Of Natural, At, Central Park West, Street, Th, York, New & Ny, 2005, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History. Part 6. Passeriformes: Prunellidae, Turdidae, Orthonychidae, Timaliidae, Paradoxornithidae, Picathartidae, And Polioptilidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2005 (292), pp. 1-132 : 30

Arrenga blighi Holdsworth

Arrenga blighi Holdsworth, 1872: 444 (Nuwara Eliya, and Ceylon Hills).

Now Myophonus blighi ( Holdsworth, 1872) . See Clement, 2000: 210.

SYNTYPES: AMNH 590302 , adult male, collected in the ‘‘ Ceylon Hills’ ’ at 4000 ft, in February 1866, by Samuel Bligh ; and AMNH 590303 , juvenile female, collected at Nuwara Eliya , 068589N, 808469E (Times Atlas), Sri Lanka, on 27 June 1870, by E. Holdsworth. From the Rothschild Collection .

COMMENTS: Holdsworth based his description on two specimens but did not designate a type. One was the above juvenile female, collected by Holdsworth at Nuwara Eliya on 27 June 1870 (not July 1870). The second specimen was one previously collected in ‘‘the hills’’ by Samuel Bligh, for whom the taxon was named. Bligh had sent this specimen to ‘‘Mr. Master of Norwich’’, but Holdsworth had seen this specimen and apparently added it to his collection. Both of these specimens have Holdsworth Collection labels and are marked ‘‘type’’, apparently in Holdsworth’s hand. There is no record of when the specimens came to Rothschild, but they were not listed by Hartert in any of his lists of types in the Rothschild Collection and had not previously been included in the AMNH type collection. Both were illustrated in the original description, plate XIX.

Contra Ripley (1964: 140), Legge (1878 – 1880: 464) did not ‘‘correct’’ the type locality to Lemastota oya, 4200 ft, Haputale District. Legge pinpointed Bligh’s collecting locality as ‘‘at an altitude of about 4200 feet, in forest on the banks of the Lemastota oya, which descends through the magnificent gorge below the Pite­Ratmalie Estate, Haputale, to the town of Lemas’’. Legge also gave the collecting locality of Holdsworth’s specimen, as well as his own specimens, collected later. The Lemastota oya is at 068439N, 808599E (USBGN, 1960) and Haputale is at 068469N, 808599E (Times Atlas). The correct spelling of the genus is Myophonus ( Deignan, 1965: 3–4; Dickinson, 2001: 29).