Bowdleria punctata vealeae Kemp

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 : 19

Bowdleria punctata vealeae Kemp

Bowdleria punctata vealeae Kemp, 1912: 124 (Umawera, Hokianga, North Island).

Now Megalurus punctatus vealeae ( Kemp, 1912) . See del Hoyo et al., 2006: 580.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 598191 , unsexed adult, collected at Umawera , Hokianga Harbour , ca. 35.35S, 172.40E, North Island, New Zealand, in August 1907, by Robin Kemp. From the Mathews Collection via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: In the original description in Mathews’ Austral Avian Record, Kemp said that the type from Umawera, Hokianga, was then in his possession; he gave only a single measurement. I was unable to determine when the specimen passed to Mathews, as I did not find it listed in Mathews’ catalog.

The holotype bears Mathews and Rothschild type labels. A note on the latter, ‘‘Figured by Lodge in the Birds of New Zealand’’, refers to a watercolor by George Edward Lodge. It was among 89 watercolors commissioned by the New Zealand government in the early 1900s to illustrate a replacement edition, never published, of Buller’s Birds of New Zealand. The plates were published much later, with a text by Sir Charles Fleming (1982: 338–340), and the painting of M. p. vealei (sic) is the upper figure in plate 78.

Sibley and Ahlquist (1987: 64–65) considered Bowdleria probably congeneric with Megalurus on the basis of their DNA-DNA hybridization studies, although Olson (1990) thought anatomical differences between the two genera were sufficient for recognition.