Cisticola chiniana ukamba Lynes, 1930

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 : 37

Cisticola chiniana ukamba Lynes

Cisticola chiniana ukamba Lynes, 1930: 670 (Masongaleni, Ukamba Distr., Kenya Col.).

Now Cisticola chiniana ukamba Lynes, 1930 . See Parkes, 1987, and Urban et al., 1997: 159.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 593298 , adult male, collected at Masongaleni , 02.29S, 38.03E ( Polhill, 1988: 221), Kenya, on 11 August 1918, by V.G.L. van Someren. From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Contra Watson et al. (1986a: 94), van Someren (1922: 210) did not name his birds semifasciata . He incorrectly identified them as Cisticola semifasciata Reichenow, and Lynes (1930: 670) , finding that they were without a name, supplied Cisticola chiniana ukamba , designating as type the above specimen and noting that it was in the Rothschild Collection. There are four male specimens from Masongaleni collected on 11 August; however, my measurements of AMNH 593298 match measurements of wing 66 mm and tail 57 mm, which were given in the original description. My measurements of the other three specimens are: AMNH 593299, 67 mm, tail partly missing; AMNH 593300, 64 mm and 56 mm; AMNH 593301, 65 mm and 60.5 mm. AMNH 593298 bears van Someren’s field label, a Rothschld Collection label, and a blank BMNH type label, filled in by Lynes. It is undoubtedly the specimen he intended as the holotype; the specimen was never in BMNH. It is figured in pl. 10 of Lynes (1930), but the color shown is much too brown. The type was not listed in Hartert’s type lists, as the name was published after the last of Hartert’s lists of types in Rothschild’s general collection. Subsequent type lists prepared by Hartert dealt with the Mathews Collection.

Lynes (1930: 269) listed as part of his type series 24 specimens (including the type) that he examined in the Rothschild Collection, collected by Ansorge, V.G.L. van Someren, and N. van Someren; these 23 paratypes are now AMNH 593285–593297 and 593299– 593308. Of these, I did not find the Ansorge specimen, AMNH 593285 , in the collection. Other paratypes listed in the original description are in other collections, including RMCA ( Louette et al., 2002: 45) .