Zosterops clara Sharpe

Mary, 2011, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 9. Passeriformes: Zosteropidae And Meliphagidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2011 (348), pp. 1-193 : 9-10

Zosterops clara Sharpe

Zosterops clara Sharpe, 1888b: 479 (Kina Balu).

Now Zosterops atricapilla atricapilla Salvadori, 1879 . See Hartert, 1920: 435, Mees, 1957: 138– 141, Smythies, 2000: 594–595, and van Balen, 2008: 449.

LECTOTYPE: AMNH 700055 , adult male, collected on Mount Kinabalu , 4000 ft, 06.03N, 116.32E (Times Atlas), Sabah, Malaysia, on 9 March 1888, by John Whitehead (no. 2179). From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Sharpe neither designated a type in the original description nor indicated the size of his type series. Later, he ( Sharpe, 1889: 427) listed four specimens, three of which came to AMNH with the Rothschild Collection. Hartert (1920: 435), by listing the specimen bearing Whitehead’s unique field no. 2179 as the type, designated it the lectotype. The Whitehead label of this specimen is marked ‘‘Type R.B.S[harpe]’’ and is his specimen ‘‘a’’ (although this letter does not appear on the label), which was originally dated ‘‘1887,’’ with the ‘‘7’’ overwritten by an ‘‘8.’’

In Sharpe (1889: 427) all of the specimens of clara are listed as being from the 1888 expedition. This is correct, as Whitehead (in Sharpe, 1889: 428) reported that he met with this form at only one locality on Kinabalu at about 5000 ft [4000 ft on all of his labels], on his 1888 second ascent of Kinabalu. On his 1887 trip he only collected what is now Zosterops everetti tahanensis , the lower altitude Zosterops , reported by Sharpe (1887: 452) as inseparable from Z. auriventer and later named Zosterops aureiventer [sic] parvus Hachisuka, 1926, holotype in BMNH ( Warren and Harrison, 1971: 421). Whitehead’s field numbers from specimens collected on the 1887 expedition are in the 1000s.

Three additional specimens of clara were listed by Sharpe (1889: 427), two of which came to AMNH and are paralectotypes: AMNH 700057 , male, 5 April 1888, White- head no. 2393 (Sharpe’s ‘‘b’’ or ‘‘c’’) ; AMNH 700058 , female, 3 February 1888, with the ‘‘8’’ overwritten by a ‘‘7’’(!), Whitehead no. 2104 (Sharpe’s ‘‘d’’) .

The second male paralectotype collected on 5 April 1888 is in BMNH, Register no. 1898.9.30.219, ex museum of Henry Seebohm (R. Prys-Jones, personal commun.).

AMNH has a fourth specimen of this form which was not listed by Sharpe, AMNH 700056, male, collected on 3 February ‘‘1887,’’ Whitehead no. 2103. The field number indicates that it also was collected in 1888. It may not have been in Sharpe’s hand when he described Z. clara and I do not consider it a paralectotype.