Grantsau 2010 (1 Viewer)

New book - Brazil

Dear all,

Just to let you know of a recent publication (Dec. 2010):

Grantsau, Rolf (2010) Guia completo para identificação das aves do Brasil. 2 vol. Ed.
Vento Verde, São Carlos, 1249p.

Grantsau, to complete 83 years next March, was one of Stresemann's students. He is a trully naturalist with books (yet to be printed) on bats, frogs, fauna of Antartica (from invertebrates to birds and mammals), moths, etc. But his passion are the birds, especially hummingbirds. Being from the "old school", his recent book brings identification keys to Orders, to Families, genera, species and subspecies (that occur in Brazil, of course). It's curious to note that most present-day ornithologist first identify any given bird species, and only then find which family the bird belong to. All Brazilian bird species and many of the subspecies are ilustrated by Grantsau himself. The book is specially helpfull when working with birds at hand. For an instance, several times the dianostic features highlighted by Grantsau is a morphometric measurement. Almost all hummingbirds and a few other species are ilustrated with his "fotoarte" (as he calls it): he takes several pictures of a bird study skin and later "creates" the bird in its natural position using photoshop! This technique allows him to show the color of hummingbird iridescent feather in all body parts at once [to see an example of his technique, although not with hummingbirds, take a look on the plate of Charadrius wilsonia sspp. in the paper that describes C. wilsonia brasiliensis (upper right corner) http://www.ao.com.br/download/ao142_4.pdf].

In this book, Grantsau described a few new taxa:
Thalurania furcata rupicola
Dacnis lineata albirostris
Dacnis flaviventer orientalis
new genus Sakesphoroides (for Sakesphorus cristatus)

More details on the book can be seen (in Portuguese only) at http://www.ventoverde.com/site/guia-completo-para-identificacao-das-aves-do-brasil.html

Best,

Vítor de Q. Piacentini
Biol., MSc.

Click to expand...

Thalurania tschudii, Gould, 1860. "Tschudi's Woodnymph": treated as a species by Cory (1918), but Peters (1945) considered it a synonym of T. furcata jelskii. See Warren (1966) and Mlíkovský (2009) for additional details on the nomenclature and history of this taxon; they consider it the correct name for T. f. jelskii (e.g., Dickinson 2003).

Click to expand...

Taphrospilus said:

Why is Dickinson 2003 not accepted?

Click to expand...

Taphrospilus said:

Avibase here lumped Thalurania furcata rupicola with Thalurania furcata eriphile (Lesson, 1832). Here distinguish both by blackish steel-blue versus brown with white edges undertail coverts. So why is Thalurania furcata rupicola not accepted as seperate subspecies?

Click to expand...

Page 391: insert Thalurania furcata rupicola Grantsau, 2010. [mentioned in a footnote on p. 126].

Click to expand...

Taphrospilus said:

OK after I read Peters I assume that he made the distingish because Sclaters bird was from Gualaquiza and/or either from the town Zamora or Zamora-Chinchipe Province within the distribution range of Thalurania furcata nigrofasciata (Gould), 1846. Therefore priortiy to Gould 1846.

Click to expand...