Pachycephala orpheus wetterensis Hellmayr

Pachycephalidae, Aegithalidae, Remizidae, Paridae, Sittidae, Neosittidae, Certhiidae, Rhabdornithidae, Climacteridae, Dicaeidae, Pardalotidae, Nectariniidae, And & Lecroy, Mary, 2010, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 8. Passeriformes:, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2010 (333), pp. 1-178 : 20

Pachycephala orpheus wetterensis Hellmayr

Pachycephala orpheus wetterensis Hellmayr, 1914: 35 (Wetter Isl.) .

Now Pachycephala orpheus wetterensis Hellmayr, 1914 . See Mayr, 1967: 19, and below.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 658646 , adult female, collected on Wetar (5 Wetter) Island, 07.48S,

126.18E ( White and Bruce, 1986: 491), Lesser Sunda Islands, Indonesia, on 9 October 1902, by Heinrich Kühn (no. 5725). From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: Hellmayr gave Kühn’s unique field number of the holotype in the original description and listed a type series of four males and four females, including the holotype. The seven paratypes, all collected on Wetar in 1902 by Kühn, are: AMNH 658642–658645 and 658647–658649.

Two additional specimens of this form collected by Kühn on Wetar in 1902 are not paratypes: AMNH 454274, a partial albino not mentioned by Hellmayr in his description of wetterensis, and AMNH 295114, a specimen purchased from the dealer Rosenberg by Leonard C. Sanford for AMNH.

White and Bruce (1986: 378) synonymized wetterensis with nominate orpheus , and this was followed by Dickinson (2003: 476) and by Boles (2007: 417). Nevertheless, a comparison of 20 specimens of nominate orpheus in AMNH with Hellmayr’s type series confirms that the head and back are consistently more brownish gray and the rump and upper tail coverts more rusty gold in wetterensis, supporting Mayr’s (1967: 19) recognition of wetterensis.