Taxonomy and Natural History of Nyctiphrynus rosenbergi (Caprimulgidae)

In 1895, Hartert described a distinctive new nightjar that had been collected earlier that year in the Dagua Valley of Valle, Colombia. He named the bird Caprimulgus rosenbergi n honor of the collector, W. F. Rosenberg. Chapman (1917) was the first to comment that rosenbergi resembled Nyctiphrynus ocellatus, and Cory (1918) transferred rosenbergi to Nyctiphrynus in his treatise on the Caprimulgidae. For an unexplained reason, Peters (1940) considered rosenbergi a subspecies of Nyctiphrynus ocellatus. Primarily because no new information has been obtained in the 50 years since Peters' work, rosenbergi has continued to be treated as conspecific with ocellatus (e.g., Meyer de Schauensee 1966, Hilty and Brown 1986). Here we provide new data that unequivocally indicates that those two forms are specifically distinct. The first natural history information on N. rosenbergi was obtained near Alto Tambo, Prov. Esmeraldas, Ecuador at 275 m elevation (0?57'N, 78?33'W) during April and July 1990, by ornithologists of the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia (ANSP), and the Museo Ecuatoriano de Ciencias Naturales, Quito. On 12 April, two adults (female collected, ANSP 182347) and a juvenile male (ANSP 182348) were flushed several times from the ground in secondary forest (connected with primary forest) by G. Glenn. No vocal information was obtained. At this same site in July, however, Robbins obtained the first tape recordings of this nightjar's song. The song of rosenbergi s so different from that of nominate ocellatus that they should be treated as separate species.