Nectarinia famosa centralis van Someren

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 : 147

Nectarinia famosa centralis van Someren

Nectarinia famosa centralis (ex Neumann ms.) van Someren, 1916: 446 (Lusasa, in Uganda).

Now Nectarinia famosa cupreonitens Shelley, 1876 . See Fry et al., 2000: 213–218, and Cheke and Mann, 2008a: 272.

SYNTYPES: AMNH 690454 , adult male, collected at Kabakaba , Congo (Kinshasa), on 5 September 1906 ; AMNH 690455 , AMNH 690456 , adult males, AMNH 690457 , immature male, all three collected at Mongalula , Congo (Kinshasa), on 6 September 1906 —all four collected by C.F. C[amburn] for Maurice de Rothschild ; AMNH 690468 , female, collected in Ankole, Uganda, and AMNH 690469 , adult male, collected at Lusasa , Uganda, both on 4 November 1910, from the van Someren Collection. All from the Rothschild Collection .

COMMENTS: van Someren (1916: 446) noted that his two specimens resembled specimens in the Rothschild Collection la-

beled by O. Neumann with the manuscript name Nectarinia famosa centralis and that their bills were not so curved as in N. cupreonitens ; thus centralis was made available by comparative diagnosis. No type was specified, even though AMNH 690454 had been marked ‘‘Typus’’ by Neumann; therefore the four specimens labeled ‘‘ centralis ’’ by Neumann and the two van Someren specimens must be considered syntypes.

Don Turner (personal commun.) has informed me that the van Someren specimens were undoubtedly collected by Robert van Someren and that Lusasa at 00.10N, 31.30E (south of Mubende) is on the route of Robert’s travels from Kampala to Toro and Lake Edward in November 1910. As both specimens were collected on the same day, the collecting locality of the female must be nearby, but I am unable to read what is written on the label. On the Rothschild Museum label of these two specimens is a note by Hartert: ‘‘Presented by Dr. V.G. L. van Someren. ’’

There is more to the story than appears in the above. Hartert later undertook a major editing job on van Someren’s (1922) long paper on the birds of East Africa; the effort involved is apparent from the uncharacteristically harsh note added by Hartert ( van Someren, 1922: 3 ). In the paragraph about Nectarinia famosa ( van Someren, 1922: 193) , centralis is listed as a synonym of N. f. aeneigularis Sharpe, with the pithy footnote initialed by Hartert: ‘‘It is always undesirable to write unpublished names on labels, but still more objectionable to quote them in print,’’ pointing the finger at both Neumann and van Someren. Hartert (1920a: 426) had himself published another manuscript name of Neumann’s, Cinnyris alinae vulcanorum , noting that Neumann had failed to publish it. Furthermore, Hartert, perhaps inadvertently, omitted centralis from his lists of types in the Rothschild Collection. Much later, van Someren (1932: 349) belatedly apologized to Neumann for ‘‘jumping his claim’’ to the authorship of centralis, saying that he had not meant to introduce the name. The final twist in this rather bizarre interchange is that Sclater (1930: 682) recognized centralis and van Someren (1932: 349) used it. The specimens concerned did not bear Rothschild type labels and had not previously been recognized as types at AMNH.