LOCALITY AND DATE OF COLLECTION OF THE TYPE SPECIMEN OF THE SLATE-COLORED FOX SPARROW

摘要

It has been generally accepted that the type specimen of the Slate-colored Fox Sparrow (Passerella iliaca schistacea Baird, 1858), preserved in the U.S. National Museum of Natural History as USNM A 5718, was collected 19 July 1856 in southwestern Nebraska (AOU 1910, 1931, 1957, Deignan 1961). Questions regarding the locality of collection persist, however, primarily because it is in short-grass prairie (Kaul and Rolfsmeier 1983) some 370 km east of the nearest known sites of breeding in the Medicine Bow Mountains of southeastern Wyoming (Faulkner 2010; www. eBird.org, species map accessed January 2021). The stage of molt of the adult female specimen (Swarth 1920, Pyle 1997) suggests a date later than mid-July or a different collection location. Mid-July significantly precedes the Fox Sparrow's usual time of fall migration in September and October. There have been no records documented by specimen or photograph of this taxon in Nebraska in the ensuing 160+ years (Silcock and Jorgensen 2020); the nearest such records are along the Front Range of eastern Colorado during migration (eBird.org, accessed January 2021). Finally, questions have been raised (Swarth 1920, Goetzmann 1959, Moore 1986, Wright 2019) about the accuracy of the record as presented by Baird et al. (1858). Here I address these questions in more detail.