Conopoderas caffra aquilonis Murphy and Mathews

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 : 32

Conopoderas caffra aquilonis Murphy and Mathews

Conopoderas caffra aquilonis Murphy and Mathews, 1928: 17 (Eiao Island, Marquesas Group).

Now Acrocephalus percernis aquilonis ( Murphy and Mathews, 1928) . See Watson et al., 1986a: 72, del Hoyo et al., 2006: 630, Cibois et al., 2007, and Cibois et al., 2008.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 195357 , adult male, collected on Eiao Island , 08.00S, 140.40W (Times Atlas), Marquesas Islands, French Polynesia, on 2 October 1922, by Rollo H. Beck on the Whitney South Sea Expedition (no. 5277).

COMMENTS: The AMNH number of the holotype was given in the original description. The type series was said to include ‘‘Specimens from Eiao collected during September and October, 1922’’. The following specimens are paratypes: AMNH 195358–195394 and 221834. Of these, AMNH 195374, 195380, and 195383 had been exchanged to the Rothschild Collection, and when AMNH purchased that collection, they were renumbered AMNH 594924, 594926, and 594925, respectively. AMNH 195367 was exchanged to ZMB in July 1936. I did not find AMNH 195364, 195368, 195378, 195379, 195385, and 195388 in the collection, and they may have been exchanged to other institutions without the catalog having been so marked.

Dickinson (2003: 585) listed aquilonis as a subspecies of A. caffer and referenced other treatments. Recent mtDNA studies by Cibois et al. (2007) showed that populations from the northern Marquesas comprised an independent lineage; their proposed classification included aquilonis from Eiao in the species A. percernis .