Curruca musica Brehm

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 : 73

Curruca musica Brehm

Curruca musica Brehm, 1855: 228 (Sie kommt warscheinlich aus Südosteuropa und Asien nach Sennaar).

Now Sylvia hortensis crassirostris Cretzschmar, 1930 . See Hartert, 1918a: 32, and del Hoyo et al., 2006: 697.

LECTOTYPE: AMNH 455543 , adult male, collected on the Blue Nile, Sennar, Sudan, on 14 February (not September) 1850, by A.E. Brehm. From the Brehm Collection via the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Brehm did not indicate how many specimens he had; the above specimen was listed as the type of musica by Hartert (1918a: 32), thereby designating it the lectotype. I did not find other specimens labeled musica by Brehm.

The collecting locality on the lectotype is written as ‘‘Baeher el Asrak’’. According to Seltzer (1962: 232), this is Bahr el Azraq, Arabic for the Blue Nile. The collecting locality would have been Old Sennar, 13.40N, 33.33E (R. Dowsett, personal commun.). The date on the original label is ‘‘14 Fbr [1]850’’, miscopied onto the Rothschild label as 14 September 1850. Also, this is another case in which C.L. Brehm apparently decided to change the sex given on the original label. It was originally sexed as a female on A.E. Brehm’s field label, with a male symbol written over the female symbol by C.L. Brehm. This was correctly copied onto the Rothschild Collection label, but incorrectly identified as a male on the Rothschild type label (and changed to a female by hand unknown). It was listed as a female by Hartert (1918a: 32), who rarely questioned information provided by A.E. Brehm.

Steinheimer (2005: 211) provided a corrected date for Cretzschmar’s description of S. h. crassirostris .

Shirihai et al. (2001: 157) considered S. hortensis and S. crassirostris allospecies of the superspecies hortensis .