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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mb1848" data-source="post: 1802159" data-attributes="member: 31036">Well, was Picoides americanus a hypothetical concept to Brehm?  I thought it might be a misidentification which is different.  How do you prove hypotheticality?  Strickland said Brehm “continues his predilection for imaginary diagnoses in the memoirs which he publishes in the' Isis.”  (He set up 5 subspecies of Nutcracker in 1833 in the Isis)  Imaginary equals hypothetical in my book.  However, this might just be a manifestation of the traditional British jealousy at German intellectual superiority.  Hartert says about the nutcracker: Brehm clearly distinguished, almost a century ago, between the two forms of Nutcrackers, the thick-billed European and the thin-billed Siberian one, but he shot far over the mark in separating four others, based on individual characters, and he was quite in the dark about the real home of macrorhynchos, which he believed to be a European mountain-form, like the thick-billed one is in Central Europe. We now know that it inhabits Siberia and migrates into Europe.” N. Z. 1918. Today 2010  there are 8-10 subspecies of Spotted Nutcracker including N. macrorhynchos (Brehm) Page 103:<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=kaY-AAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Lehrbuch+der+Naturgeschichte+alle+Europaischen+Vogel&source=gbs_book_other_versions#v=onepage&q&f=false" target="_blank">http://books.google.com/books?id=kaY-AAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Lehrbuch+der+Naturgeschichte+alle+Europaischen+Vogel&source=gbs_book_other_versions#v=onepage&q&f=false</a> .Bangs in 1930 said that Hartert searched Brehm’s collection and it did not have any North American woodpeckers.  However, some of C.L. Brehm’s collection went to Berlin: “…a busy exchange has been developed with Brehm during the 1820s (Muggelberg, 1969) and parts of his collection came to the Berlin Museum in 1830 and 1833.  In 1832 Brehm stayed in Berlin and worked in the collection for several days.”<a href="http://www.repository.naturalis.nl/document/42167" target="_blank">http://www.repository.naturalis.nl/document/42167</a> .<a href="http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118741103/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0" target="_blank">http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/journal/118741103/abstract?CRETRY=1&SRETRY=0</a> .Brehm  was a staff member of the museum at Altenburg Germany. And ~3000 skins of Brehm (father & son) are at Zoologisches Forschungsinsittut und Museum Alexander Koenig in Bonn, Germany.  The natural history museums at Braunshcweig  Vienna, Halle, and Coburg have some of C. L. Brehm’s skins.    <a href="http://www.scricciolo.com/european.bird.collections_c%20s%20roselaar.pdf" target="_blank">http://www.scricciolo.com/european.bird.collections_c s roselaar.pdf</a> .Therefore, he may have had a type of an American three-toed Woodpecker after all.  Then it cannot be hypothetical??</blockquote>

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