Sericornis beccarii imitator Mayr

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 : 134

Sericornis beccarii imitator Mayr

Sericornis beccarii imitator Mayr, 1937: 12 (Siwi, Arfak Mts.) .

Now Sericornis magnirostra imitator Mayr, 1937 . See Coates, 1990: 105, and Schodde and Mason, 1999: 174.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 450828 , adult male, collected on ‘‘ Berge bei Siwi’ ’, 01.30S, 134.02E ( USBGN, 1982a), Arfak Mountains , Papua Province, Indonesia, on 26 April 1928, by Ernst Mayr (no. 239). From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Mayr cited the AMNH catalog number of the holotype in the original description and gave measurements of five males (including the type) and four females. Paratypes are the eight birds for which measurements were given and two unsexed specimens from Siwi: AMNH 293865–293870 and AMNH 601552–601555. AMNH 293869 and 601553 were exchanged to FMNH in the 1960s.

Mayr’s 1928 fieldwork in former Dutch New Guinea was supported by Rothschild and by Leonard C. Sanford for AMNH; the collection was reported on by Hartert (1930a, 1930b) and divided between the two collections, with Sanford’s part being stamped with a red ‘‘S’’ within a circle. With the purchase of the Rothschild Collection in 1932, both parts of the collection were again brought together, apart from a smaller number of specimens sent to MZB.

In del Hoyo et al. (2007: 584), imitator is considered a subspecies of Sericornis virgatus .