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Message: <blockquote data-quote="janvanderbrugge" data-source="post: 3463008" data-attributes="member: 137246">Some minor reading stuff. I wish I had dug up a little more concrete material than the dust resting on the same topics discussed back in 2015 . . .To his description of the proposed Aegintha Dühringi Russ had added a description of the Dunkelrother Astrild, Aegintha rubricata, and added to his text: Heuglin says that his Lagonosticta rhodopareia has the abdomen and also the under tail-feathers black.I remembered I have an old avicultural book in my collection which has to do with Karl Russ. It is Dr. Karl Russ' Vogelzuchtbuch, adapted by Karl Neunzig in 1907. On p.136 Neunzig describes the Hellroter Astrild - Lagonosticta congica Sharpe. He says: Kongogebiet. Ist zweifellos von Russ mit "Dührings roter Astrild" gemeint. (= Kongo region. Is doubtless what Russ meant with Dührings roter Astrild). So there was the name Dühring again. I made a hand-written comparison of Russ's description (from Die Gefiederte Welt) and the description from HBW15, p.341, pl.22. Sharpe's congica is Lagonosticta rubricata congica, which has also been regarded as a subspecies of L.rhodopareia . . . (this shows the identity problems already)The illustrations of Lagonosticta in HBW are not the best choice, I think, nor those in Goodwin's Estrildid finches of the World (1982, only a few are illustrated). The plates in Helm's guide Finches & Sparrow (1993) are fine, but as long as there is no type locality it is a wild guess where Düringi woull belong (as Laurent stated last year). Besides, several new subspecies have been described since Neunzig's and Sharpe's days.Russ's description is detailed, however, sometimes obsolete. He described the breast and the flanks of Düringias "lebhaft hell todtenkopfroth": vividly bright . . . I had to look twice: death-head-red . . . In a footnote he tells a painter had given him the right names of the colours: the Dunkelrother Astrild (dark red) is purple, properly speaking: "van Dyck-roth", the male of Düringi is "Caput-mortuum-roth"; the female is not "einfarbig graubraun, mit lebhaft gelbgrauen Schein"(= uniform grey-brown, with vivid yellow-grey hue), but: ocker-(gebrannt) gelbbraun (= ochre-(burnt) yellow-brown). I wonder if the colour skull-red can be found in the famous colour-list of Ridgway. Maybe we should include painting history in our eponym research . . . For Björn: "ein rother Astrild" is: a red waxbill, not: a redder waxbill . . . This -er is a consequence of the German grammar rules. There is some progress in spelling: in roth one should leave the h out nowadays. If you decide to give up your German explorations, you need not bother about grammar, but I think it is too bad to shun all German and French ornithological stuff. There are critics here (at least one) to look after you when you stumble on it! (and might rely on you when checking Sparrman or Sundevall) Keep enjoying.Jan van der Brugge, Netherlands</blockquote>

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