Paradisea intermedia De Vis

Lecroy, Mary, 2014, Type Specimens Of Birds In The American Museum Of Natural History Part 12. Passeriformes: Ploceidae, Sturnidae, Buphagidae, Oriolidae, Dicruridae, Callaeidae, Grallinidae, Corcoracidae, Artamidae, Cracticidae, Ptilonorhynchidae, Cnemophilidae, Paradisaeidae, And Corvidae, Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 2014 (393), pp. 1-165 : 108

Paradisea intermedia De Vis

Paradisea intermedia De Vis, 1894: 105 (Kumusi River (North-east Coast, head of Holnicott [sic] Bay )).

Now Paradisaea raggiana intermedia De Vis, 1894 . See Rothschild and Hartert, 1903: 81; Mayr, 1962d: 200; Gilliard, 1969: 222–229; Coates, 1990: 508–516; Cracraft, 1992: 35; Frith and Beehler, 1998: 456–469; and Frith and Frith, 2009b: 488.

SYNTYPE: AMNH 678835, adult male, collected on the Kumusi (= Coommassie, as on label) River, 08.32S, 147.57E ( Frith and Beehler, 1998: 568), Holnicote Bay, Oro Province, Papua New Guinea, No. T.52. From the Rothschild Collection.

COMMENTS: De Vis, in his description of this form, said that he had three males. Because he did not designate a holotype, the three specimens are syntypes and would have been deposited in the QM. Ingram (1987: 245) listed two syntypes of intermedia present in QM, both numbered T.52, and mentioned that one syntype had not been found. The above specimen is undoubtedly the missing syntype, so marked by Hartert on the Rothschild label. Rothschild and Hartert (1903: 81) also noted that it was received in exchange and was one of the ‘‘cotypes.’’ It does not have a label bearing the names of the collectors or the date of collection. Because Hartert did not list this syntype in any of his lists of types in the Rothschild Collection, it had lain unrecognized in the AMNH general collection until 2010.

Because most of the birds reported on by De Vis (1894) were collected by W.E. Armit and R.E. Guise on an expedition to Mount Maneo (= Manaeo), 09.45S, 149.20E, inland from Collingwood Bay, in March and April 1894, Ingram apparently made the assumption that these birds were collected during that trip. However, the birds from the Kumusi River were part of a supplementary list added by De Vis (1894: 104– 105) and did not come from the Armit and Guise side trip (see Guise, 1894: 78–87). The only Paradisaea collected by Armit and Guise was a female P. raggiana in spirits ( De Vis, 1894: 104).

A perusal of Macgregor’s (1894: 30, 36) account of the main expedition along the north Papuan coast shows that Armit and Guise were dropped off on 27 February to pursue their climb of Mount Maneo and picked up on 12 April. Meanwhile, the rest of the party continued along the north coast. The Kumusi River flows into Holnicote Bay much farther to the northwest. Macgregor’s party reached the mouth of the Kumusi on 17 March and began a trip up the river in their steam launch for about 46 miles, returning to the coast on the 21 March ( Macgregor, 1894: 33–34). It was undoubtedly on this part of the trip that the three specimens of Paradisaea intermedia were collected.

Stresemann (1922: 111–112) listed the De Vis names from the 1894 paper, but unaccountably stopped at page 104 and did not list the two new forms that were described on page 105. Mayr (1930b: 913–917) listed other De Vis names described in later papers but did not include the names that had been omitted by Stresemann.

Frith and Beehler (1998: 459) listed a type of intermedia in ROM, but this is an error. B. Millen (personal commun.) has checked this specimen for me ; it was collected by A.S. Meek, in Collingwood Bay, not on the Kumusi River, in 1899, long after DeVis’ description of intermedia , and thus it cannot be a syntype .