Athene albifacies G. R. Gray, 1845

MZUT AV16891; mount; unsexed adult; New Zealand, no date; purchased in Milano by G. Gené for MZUT in September 1844.

Remarks.—On an old label, the specimen is identified as Athene novae zelandiae (now Morepork Ninox novaeseelandiae), but this is easily explained because, at the time of purchase, A. albifacies was undescribed.

There is no reliable information as to how this specimen arrived in Europe. The only date we found in the manuscript catalogues (September 1844) clearly refers to the purchase by Prof. Giuseppe Gené for MZUT. The same date is linked to four other specimens from New Zealand purchased by Gené for MZUT, of New Zealand Falcon Falco novaeseelandiae, New Zealand Kaka Nestor meridionalis and South Island Piopio Turnagra capensis (see below).

It is noteworthy that in the Museo Civico di Storia Naturale di Milano (Violani et al. 1984) there are two specimens of extinct New Zealand taxa, Norfolk Island Pigeon Hemiphaga novaeseelandiae spadicea and Turnagra capensis, also purchased in 1844, from the dealers L. Bonomi and L. Colombo, respectively. We believe that one of them could have sold the specimens now in Torino to Gené.

Percy William Earl (1811–46) was an itinerant British collector who worked in New Zealand in 1843–45 and sold an important collection of birds to the British Museum (Natural History), London (Scofield et al. 2013). The holotype of Athene albifacies ‘formed part of Mr. Percy Earl’s collection’ purchased by the British Museum presumably in late 1844 and registered in early 1845, while Gray was editing the bird volume of The zoology of the Erebus & Terror expedition. For this reason, Gray (1845) choose to describe in this volume several new taxa collected by Earl, causing confusion among many subsequent authors as to the provenance of his collections. If the date of purchase by MZUT from Gené (September 1844) is correct, this specimen may have been the first of this species to reach Europe, as it predated the arrival of Earl’s in London (Scofield et al. 2013).

Finally, we note that the date of description, 1844, reported universally (e.g., Peters 1940, Worthy 2010, Dickinson & Remsen 2013, del Hoyo & Collar 2014), should be corrected to 1845, based on the clarifications proffered by Mathews (1938). Unfortunately, due to a lapsus, Mathews referred to Athene albifrons, instead of A. albifacies: this error evidently induced subsequent authors to ignore Mathews’ paper when dating the original description by G. R. Gray.