Curruca Vidali Brehm

LeCroy, M., 2008, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History. Part 7. Passeriformes: Sylviidae, Muscicapidae, Platysteiridae, Maluridae, Acanthizidae, Monarchidae, Rhipiduridae, And Petroicidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 313 (1), pp. 1-287 : 72

Curruca Vidali Brehm

Curruca Vidali Brehm, 1857 (1856): 455 ( Spain is implied but not stated).

Now Sylvia hortensis hortensis (Gmelin, 1789) . See Hartert, 1918a: 31, and del Hoyo et al., 2006: 697.

SYNTYPES: AMNH 455539 , male, and AMNH 455540 , female collected at Murcia, 37.59N, 01.08W (Times Atlas), Spain, on 20 September 1856, by A.E. Brehm ; AMNH

455541, female, collected at Jativa, 39.00N, 00.32W (Times Atlas), Valencia, Spain, 12 July 1856. From the Brehm Collection via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Hartert (1918a: 31) considered specimens now cataloged as AMNH 455539 and 455540 to be syntypes of Curruca vidali C.L. Brehm , Curruca caniceps C.L. Brehm , and Curruca orphea griseocapilla A.E. Brehm. See above for a discussion of Curruca caniceps . Because A.E. Brehm (1857: 464) noted that his new subspecies, griseocapilla, was the gray-headed form, found in Catalonia and Valencia, I do not consider the above Murcia specimens to be syntypes of griseocapilla (see below). Both of the Murcia specimens retain A.E. Brehm’s labels originally identified as C. orphea and relabeled ‘‘ Vidali ’’ by C.L. Brehm. There is one additional specimen that I consider a syntype of C. Vidali: AMNH 455541, a specimen that was probably collected by A.E. Brehm at Jativa, but which has only a label written by C.L. Brehm identifying it as Curruca vidali . This specimen is in poor condition, and a note by Hartert on the added Rothschild label states: ‘‘Wahrscheinl. einst schöner Balg von A.E. Brehm, später durch ausstopfen ruiniert?! E.H.’’. I consider it also a syntype of griseocapilla (see below).

A fourth specimen, AMNH 455542, is labeled ‘‘ Vidali ’’ by Brehm and marked ‘‘?Typus von ‘ vidali ’’’ by Hartert; however, this specimen is from Dalmatia, a locality not mentioned by Brehm, and is now identified as S. hortensis crassirostris . I do not consider it a syntype.

The date of publication of this name is usually given as 1856; however, as Hartert (1918a: 31) pointed out, a note published on p. 505 of the same issue is dated 16 February 1857, so publication must have been after that date.

Shirihai et al. (2001: 157) considered S. hortensis and S. crassirostris to be allospecies of the superspecies hortensis .