Passer hemileucus Ogilvie-Grant and Forbes

Passer hemileucus Ogilvie-Grant and Forbes, 1899: 3 (Island of Abd-el-Kuri).

Now Passer hemileucus Ogilvie-Grant and Forbes, 1899 . See Ogilvie-Grant and Forbes, 1903: 58– 59, pl. 7, fig. 1; Dickinson, 2003: 716; Kirwan, 2008: 83–93; and Summers-Smith, 2009: 799.

SYNTYPE: AMNH 719511, male, collected on Abd al-Kuri (= Abd-el-Kuri) Island (between Somalia and Socotra), on 22 February 1899, by W.R. Ogilvie-Grant (no. 480). From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Ogilvie-Grant and Forbes did not designate a type or enumerate their specimens in the original description. Later, Ogilvie-Grant and Forbes (1903: 58–59) noted that they had collected three males and one female on Abd al Kuri. They had visited the island twice, 3–5 December 1898 and 22–23 February 1899 (Forbes, 1903: xxiv–xxxi). The AMNH specimen had not been recognized as a syntype previously. A male and a female syntype are in BMNH (Warren and Harrison, 1971: 234) and a male syntype is in LIVCM (no. 31.12.1900.163, collected 5 December 1898, T. Parker, personal commun.).

Species limits within the Passer motitensis complex have been variously treated (see Kirwan, 2008, for a summary). Summers- Smith (2009: 709) considered P. insularis to form a superspecies with P. iagoensis, P. cordofanicus, P. shelleyi, P. rufocinctus, and P. motitensis, with hemileucus a subspecies of P. insularis . However, Kirwan (2008), as a result of his extensive morphological study of specimens of Passer insularis and Passer hemileucus, pointed out that differences between these two forms are greater than had been previously appreciated and that they should be considered species.

Dickinson et al. (2011: 190) drew attention to the incorrect dating of this name by Moreau and Greenway (1962: 15), who have been followed by most subsequent authors.