Amadonastur lacernulatus

Lima, Rafael Dantas, Silveira, Luís Fábio, Lemos, Renata Constant de Amorim, Lobo-Araújo, Lahert William, Andrade, Arthur Barbosa de, Francisco, Mercival Roberto & Efe, Márcio Amorim, 2022, An annotated avian inventory of the Brazilian state of Alagoas, one of the world’s most threatened avifauna, Papéis Avulsos de Zoologia 62, pp. 1-36 : 35

Amadonastur lacernulatus

Alleged occurrence of this species in the PCE is due to a cascade of errors. Another white hawk that occurs in the PCE, the White-collared Kite Leptodon forbesi , was long believed to be an invalid species (see Dénes et al., 2011). It follows that L. forbesi was largely omitted from field guides and reference works (e.g., Sick, 1997) and thus many ornithologists made misidentifications of white hawks in the PCE. Pinto & Camargo (1961) were the first to report the occurrence of A. lacernulatus in the PCE.They collected a specimen of L. forbesi in Alagoas and misidentified it as A. lacernulatus , an error discovered only decades later after reexamination of the specimen (Dénes et al., 2011). In the meantime, the alleged occurrence of A.lacernulatus in the PCE,based on Pinto and Camargo’s misidentified record, was widely disseminated in the ornithological literature (Pinto,1978;Collar et al., 1992;Thiollay, 1994;Pacheco & Whitney, 1995;Sick,1997; Ferguson-Lees & Christie, 2001) and some ornithologists who conducted field surveys in the PCE published a lot misidentified records allegedly of this species (Collar et al., 1992;Wege & Long, 1995; Pacheco & Whitney, 1995; Roda et al., 2003;Roda & Pereira, 2006; Almeida & Teixeira, 2010). Now, we know that L. forbesi is a valid species and relatively common in the PCE (Pereira et al., 2019a; Lima et al., 2020), and that all alleged records of A. lacernulatus in this region are likely misidentifications of either L. forbesi or Mantled Hawk Pseudastur polionotus .