Pyrrhula owstoni Rothschild and Hartert

LeCroy, Mary, 2013, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 11. Passeriformes: Parulidae, Drepanididae, Vireonidae, Icteridae, Fringillinae, Carduelinae, Estrildidae, And Viduinae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2013 (381), pp. 1-155 : 82

Pyrrhula owstoni Rothschild and Hartert

Pyrrhula owstoni Rothschild and Hartert, 1907: 9 (Mt. Arizan) .

Now Pyrrhula erythaca owstoni Rothschild and Hartert, 1907 . See Hartert, 1919a: 160; Howell et al., 1968: 296; Dickinson, 2003: 756; Clement, 2010: 608.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 714757 , adult male, collected on A-li Shan (5 Mount Arizan ), 23.32N, 120.48E ( USBGN, 1974), Taiwan (5 Formosa, as on label), on 4 December ‘‘1907,’’ by collectors for Alan Owston. From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: The type, designated in the original description, was the single male collected; an additional three females and one young male formed the type series. These four paratypes, all collected on Mount Arizan , are: AMNH 714758 , male, 17 December ‘‘1907’’ ; AMNH 714759 , male (considered a female by Hartert ), 4 December 1906 ; AMNH 714760 and 714761, two females, 4 December 1906. Because this description was published on 29 October 1907, the December 1907 date of collection on two of the specimens cannot be correct .

These specimens all bear two Owston labels, one in Japanese and the other with the data translated into English. Hartert (1919a: 160) thought that the date error might have arisen in translation. He also was unwilling at that time to accept that there were two species of Pyrrhula on Taiwan and thought, instead, that owstoni should be considered a subspecies of nipalensis , with uchidai a synonym. Later workers have shown that there are, indeed, two species on Taiwan. Of Rothschild and Hartert’s type series, paratype AMNH 714758 has proven to be a specimen of Pyrrhula nipalensis uchidai ; the other three paratypes in female plumage appear to be P. e. owstoni , although there are no other specimens in AMNH of the two forms with which to compare them.

The ‘‘O.C.’’ numbers on the English and Japanese Owston labels differ. The number on the Japanese labels for all of these specimens is ‘‘31,’’ which is crossed out. ‘‘F.38’’ appears on the reverse of the Japanese labels and on the English labels as the ‘‘O.C.’’ number. Both of these numbers may be species or collector’s numbers; the ‘‘F’’ may indicate ‘‘ Formosa.’’

Many authors give the describers of owstoni as Hartert and Rothschild, but Hartert never put his own name before that of Rothschild. In the description, the title says: which ‘‘the Hon. Walter Rothschild and he proposed to describe…,’’ and Hartert (1919a: 160) himself listed it as ‘‘Rothschild and Hartert.’’