Climacteris melanura alexandrae Mathews

Pachycephalidae, Aegithalidae, Remizidae, Paridae, Sittidae, Neosittidae, Certhiidae, Rhabdornithidae, Climacteridae, Dicaeidae, Pardalotidae, Nectariniidae, And & Lecroy, Mary, 2010, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 8. Passeriformes:, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2010 (333), pp. 1-178 : 100

Climacteris melanura alexandrae Mathews

Climacteris melanura alexandrae Mathews 1912a: 381 (Alexandra [sic], Northern Territory).

Now Climacteris melanurus melanurus Gould, 1843 . See Schodde and Mason, 1999: 79–80, and Noske, 2007b: 660.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 685077 , female [male], Alexandria (5 Alexandra), 19.00S, 136.42E (Times Atlas), Northern Territory, Australia, May [1905], by Wilfred Stalker. From the Mathews Collection (no. 2795) via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Mathews cited his catalog number of the holotype in the original description and gave the range of alexandrae as Northern Territory. This collection of birds from the vicinity of Alexandria was made by Stalker in 1905 and 1906 for Sir William Ingram and was reported on by Collingwood Ingram (1907, 1909); it later became part of the Mathews Collection. The holotype bears, in addition to Stalker’s label, Mathews and Rothschild type labels and a ‘‘Figured’’ label, indicating that it was illustrated in Mathews (1923b: pl. 503, lower figure, opp. p. 128, text p. 129), where it is confirmed as the type of C. m. alexandrae. The type locality, ‘‘Alexandra,’’ is not written on Stalker’s label, but C. Ingram (1907: 387) reported it as Stalker’s main collecting locality. C. Ingram (1907: 412, and 1909: 618) had three specimens of C. melanura collected by Stalker and all three were in Mathews’ hand when alexandrae was named. The two paratypes are: AMNH 685076, adult male, collected at ‘‘Alexandra’’ in May 1905; and AMNH 685078, female, collected at Cliff Creek, Alexandria, 28 March 1906.