Madanga ruficollis Rothschild and Hartert

Mary, 2011, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 9. Passeriformes: Zosteropidae And Meliphagidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2011 (348), pp. 1-193 : 34

Madanga ruficollis Rothschild and Hartert

Madanga ruficollis Rothschild and Hartert, 1923: 118 (Wa Fehat, Buru) .

Now Madanga ruficollis Rothschild and Hartert, 1923 . See Mees, 1969: 169–171, White and Bruce, 1986: 417, and van Balen, 2008: 481.

HOLOTYPE: AMNH 701487 , unsexed [male], collected at Wa Fehat , 2700 ft, Buru Island , Moluccas, Indonesia, on 14 April 1922, by the Pratt brothers. From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: In the original description, the type was said to have been collected on 14 April 1922 at Wa Fehat; the above specimen is the only one of the four specimens comprising the type series that was collected on that date. The three paratypes, all collected in 1922 by the Pratts, are: AMNH 701488 , unsexed, collected at Wa Fehat on 8 April ; AMNH 701489 , unsexed, collected at Wa Fehat on 11 April ; AMNH 701490 , female, collected on ‘‘Mada Range’’ on 9 April. The genus Madanga was described at the same time .

Hartert (1924a: 111), in his later paper on some of the unusual birds from the Pratts’ collection on Buru, again said that four specimens were collected and noted that the ‘‘Mada Range’’ specimen was collected only one day after one of the Wa Fehat specimens. On AMNH 701490, someone has written ‘‘Mada Range’’ in ink over a pencilled name that is now indecipherable. All of the Pratts’ collection was made in west central Buru, according to Joicey and Talbot (1924). Rothschild and Hartert (1923: 118) equate mountain ranges ‘‘ Madang,’’ ‘‘Mada,’’ and ‘‘Fogha’’ with Mount Tomahu, 03.14S, 126.04E (USBGN, 1982a); whereas, Stresemann (1914b: 361) equated these mountains with Kapala Mada, which is probably the same as Kapalatmada, 03.15S, 126.09E (USBGN, 1982a). The latter seems more likely to me. Rothschild purchased only 32 of the approximately 200 bird specimens that the Pratts collected, the remainder going to BMNH ( Hartert, 1924a: 104).