Motacilla hypoleuca subsp. speculigera, Bonaparte, 1850

Salvador, Rodrigo B., Jeugd, Henk Van Der & Tomotani, Barbara M., 2017, Taxonomy of the European Pied Flycatcher Ficedula hypoleuca (Aves: Muscicapidae), Zootaxa 4291 (1), pp. 171-182 : 174-175

F. h. speculigera ( Bonaparte, 1850)

Muscicapa speculigera Bonaparte, 1850: 317 .

Type locality Algiers, Algeria . The type material is expected to be a mount in the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle ( MNHN, Paris , France), but recent searches there failed to locate it ( Fuchs , personal communication). The “ Atlas Flycatcher ”, as it is popularly known, was long considered a subspecies of F. hypoleuca (e.g., Mayr & Cottrell 1986; Howard & Moore 1994), but was recently distinguished at species rank by Saetre et al. (2001) (see also Sangster et al. 2004). Nevertheless , since Saetre et al. (2001) did not compare F. h. speculigera with the morphologically and geographically intermediate form F. h. iberiae , his assessment was widely rejected (e.g., Dickinson 2003; del Hoyo et al. 2006; Taylor & Christie 2013); few major works accepted it (e.g., Clements et al. 2015). More recently, Corso et al. (2015) and Robb & The Sound Approach (2015) have analyZed, respectively, variation in plumage characters and song, which show that it clearly differs from nominate hypoleuca , but not consistently from iberiae. Since then, Potti et al. (2016) re-analyZed morphological characters, leading him to conclude that speculigera is specifically distinct from iberiae.

The “Atlas Flycatcher” is distributed across Morocco (south to the middle Atlas Mountains), northern Algeria and northern Tunisia, and winters in western Africa (del Hoyo et al. 2006; Clements et al. 2015). There are also recent unconfirmed reports of it in Italy and Malta ( Corso et al. 2015).