Muscicapa elisae Weigold

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 : 87-88

Muscicapa elisae Weigold

Muscicapa elisae Weigold, 1922a: 1 (bei den östlichen Kaisergräbern (bei Peking )).

Now Ficedula narcissina elisae (Weigold, 1922) . See Watson et al., 1986b: 339, Cheng, 1987: 845, and Töpfer, 2006.

Probable Lectotype: AMNH 605012 , adult male, collected at Jingschujingtsze , 70 km north of Dongling (5 Dungling) (5 östlichen Kaisergräbern), Hebei, China, on 3 June 1916, by H. Weigold on the Stoetzner’sche N.O. Tschihli Expedition. From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: No type was designated in the original description. Weigold’s specimens of this form were deposited in MTD, and at some point at least three were exchanged with the Rothschild Collection. One of these (AMNH 306351) came from Rothschild in an exchange arranged by Dr. Leonard C. Sanford before the purchase of the Rothschild Collection. The other two came with the rest of the collection in 1932 (AMNH 605011 and 605012).

Weigold (1922c: 28) noted that he had collected 10 males of elisae , with 4 of them in breeding plumage, and 4 females. He designated as type (5 lectotype) an adult male with wing measuring 74 mm. Following a visit to AMNH in 1993, the late Dr. Siegfried Eck wrote me (in litt., 14 September 1993): ‘‘ Das Dresdner Museum hat im 2. Weltkrieg 5 Bälge [of elisae ] verloren, aber wahrscheinlich nicht den Typus. Weigold bezeichnete das langflügeligste adulte sals ‘‘ Typ’ ’. Das grösste ad. s, das ich fand, liegt bei Ihnen, AMNH 605012 …. In der Kartei des Dresdner Museums war kein Exemplar als Typus bezeichnet.’’ AMNH 605012 is also not marked ‘‘ Type’ ’, but I also measure the wing as 74 mm and consider it the probable lectotype of Muscicapa elisae Weigold , based on Eck’s study. The field label of this specimen records the wing as 73.5 mm. Eck (in litt., 17 May 2005) wrote that there are four paralectotypes of elisae from Jingschujingtsze in MTD. The four paralectotypes now in MTD are: C 40811 and C 40812, females ; and C 40813 and C 40814, males. The five paralectotypes apparently lost during World War II were: C 23147 and C 23148, males; C 23149, female; C 23150 and C 23151, males (T. Töpfer, personal commun., 2007).

AMNH 306351, adult male in breeding plumage, collected in the same locality on the same day, has a wing that I measure as 73.5 (wing length on field label of 72 mm). It is a paralectotype. AMNH 605011, male in nonbreeding plumage, collected on 2 June 1916 at the same locality, is also a paralectotype, as are remaining specimens in MTD.

The collecting locality is given on the Rothschild label as ‘‘N.E. [Gulf of] Chihli [5 Po Hai], Former Imperial Reserve, 70 km N. of the Dungling (eastern Imper. tombs)’’. Weigold (1922b: 7) noted that Jingschujingtsze was a village in the ‘‘Bannwald’’ between Jehol and Dungling. This ‘‘Bannwald’’ was apparently an oak forest on a hill preserved as a graveyard of the emperors. Jehol (5 Tschöngtö, now Ch’eng-te) was the Emperor’s hunting palace north of the Bannwald. Ch’eng-te is at 40.59N, 117.52E (Times Atlas).

Ficedula beijingnica ( Zheng et al., 2000) is a young male of elisae (Eck, personal commun., 2005; Eck and Töpfer, 2005: 13; Zhang et al., 2006).