Whitlocka melanota barroni 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 : 99

Whitlocka melanota barroni Mathews

Whitlocka melanota barroni Mathews, 1915a: 131 (Cairns, Queensland).

Now Climacteris picumnus melanotus Gould, 1847 . See Schodde and Mason, 1999: 77–78, and Noske, 2007b: 659.

SYNTYPES: AMNH 685060 ( Mathews no. 12439), adult male, 7 March 1912 ; AMNH 685061 (15464), adult male, 25 October 1912 ; AMNH 685062 (12438), adult male, 1 April 1912 ; AMNH 685063 (9505), female, 8 June 1911 ; AMNH 685064 (17171), female, 19 February 1913, all collected on the Barron River by Alan P. Dodd. From the Mathews Collection via the Rothschild Collection .

COMMENTS: In the original description, Mathews said that barroni was from ‘‘thick jungle near Cairns, Queensland’’ and then listed the type as ‘‘Cairns, Queensland.’’ Mathews had a series of five specimens collected between 1911 and 1913 on the Barron River by Alan P. Dodd (entered in Mathews’ catalog only as ‘‘Dodd,’’ but see Mathews, 1942: 53). Mathews consistently listed specimens he received from Dodd, who usually collected near his home at Kuranda, 16.46S, 145.37E (Times Atlas), on the Atherton Tableland (through which the Barron River flows), as coming from Cairns, where the Barron River flows into the sea. I consider these specimens to be syntypes of Whitlocka melanota barroni . They had not previously been included with the AMNH types.

The specimens are from an area of intergradation between Climacteris picumnus picumnus and C. p. melanotus ( Schodde and Mason, 1999: 77–78) and are closer to C. p.melanotus than to C. p. picumnus , as shown by figure 11 in Ford (1986: 98). Ford would have based his analysis on these same Barron River specimens and others from the Walsh River.

The name melanotus introduced by Gould, 1847, has often been spelled melanota ; however, as pointed out by Schodde and Mason, 1999: 78, it is a noun in apposition and was consistently spelled melanotus by Gould. Greenway (1967c: 164) incorrectly listed barroni as having been introduced in the genus Climacteris .