226 
C.B. and D.W. Frith 
Tom Carter (in Carter and Mathews 1920). This 
subsequent publication contains a brief but slightly 
expanded description of C. to. carteri, and is 
accompanied by a colour plate of the specimen 
collected on 9 August 1916 and now in The Natural 
History Museum, Tring (BMNH 1931.8.1.1). In the 
plate the lilac nuchal crest is shown to be far larger 
than it actually is in The Natural History Museum 
specimen or in any specimens of carteri. This may 
have led Iredale (1950) to state erroneously of C. m. 
(nova) carteri that "The female has a large nuchal 
frill". Carter and Mathews (1920) also stated that 
about half the nuchal crest feathers of the only 
male collected were deep golden yellow but these 
are in fact simply some crest feathers with a rose- 
reddish hue, which also occur, to a lesser extent, in 
the female H. L. White (HLW) specimen 6591 in 
the Museum of Victoria. The text also refers to a 
series of six birds obtained at North West Cape; a 
seventh specimen detailed herein was collected by 
Gerlof Mees in 1959. Tom Carter published some 
Figure 1 Map of western continental Australia 
showing locations mentioned in the text or 
Table 1. Solid black area = North West Cape 
(NWC); C = Callawa; HAM = Hamersley 
Range; MAC = Macdonnell Range; MUR = 
Murchison River; O = Onslow; BP = Burrup 
Peninsula; Oak = Oakover River; S = Sherlock 
River; W = Wiluna; Y = Yandil. The solid line 
encompassing Onslow and the Flamersley 
and Murchison areas and that encompassing 
and extending west of the Macdonnell Range 
indicates the approximate range of C. guttata 
in Western Australia. 
notes on the Cape Spotted Bower-bird (still as C. 
to. nova), stating that he had first collected a 
specimen of it in February 1892 (Carter and 
Mathews 1921). The specimen unfortunately 
reached Melbourne as a "mass of loose feathers" 
(Carter 1903, Carter and Mathews 1921) and has 
apparently not survived to the present day. 
By the time Mathews published the second part 
of his Systema Avium Australasianarum (Mathews 
1930), he had apparently lost confidence in the 
validity of C. m. carteri and consigned it to the 
synonymy of C. to. guttata. In a comprehensive 
review' of Australian bowerbirds to subspecific 
level, Mayr and Jennings (1952) treated the 
Mathewsian subspecies nova, subguttata and 
macdonaldi (the last referring to birds of the 
Macdonnell Ranges, Central Australia) as 
synonyms of C. guttata. This conclusion, however, 
was presumably based upon examination of only 
the single specimen of carteri in the American 
Museum of Natural History (AMNH). Since that 
time C. guttata carteri has remained unrecognised 
(Marshall 1954, Serventy and Whittell 1962, 
Gilliard 1969, Cooper and Forshaw 1977, Storr 
1984, Ford 1987a). 
Recent field studies of Western Bowerbirds on 
North West Cape proved the species to be a 
common breeding resident, with bowers of males 
and nests of females not difficult to find (Serventy 
1955, Kolichis 1979, Bradley 1987). 
METHODS 
We examined the three North West Cape 
specimens of C. guttata, from the H. L. White 
(HLW) collection in the Museum of Victoria and 
found them to be conspicuously different from 
birds from the Hamersley Range and the East 
Murchison River area (see Figures 1 and 2). The 
northwest end of Hamersley Range is not as 
discrete as indicated in Figure 1, but becomes 
lower and broken towards Onslow. During a more 
recent study tour of most world bird collections 
containing significant numbers of birds of paradise 
(Paradisaeidae), we also took the opportunity to 
examine all available specimens of C. guttata from 
the North West Cape and adjacent areas of 
Western Australia (see Table 1). In addition to the 
H. L. White specimens from North West Cape, one 
was examined in the The Natural History Museum, 
Tring, tw'o from the Western Australian Museum 
(WAM) and one at the American Museum of 
Natural History. Measurements of skins were 
taken in the standard way. The wing was 
measured straightened and flattened, with a 
stopped rule; tail length was taken from the point 
of insertion of the central pair of feathers into the 
skin to the tip of the longest feather; and bill width 
was taken at the anterior margin of the nostril with 
