Leslie McCracken and Charles Bethune Horsbrugh: collecting birds’ eggs in Northern Ireland in the 1920s and early 1930s.

This paper is a case-study of a school-boy’s egg collection in Northern Ireland in the 1920s and early 1930s. The collection and Leslie McCracken’s friendship with Charles Bethune Horsbrugh, an established naturalist, not only expanded McCracken’s consciousness far beyond the boundaries of his rural existence but also reveal, through the specimens given to McCracken by Captain Horsbrugh, the considerable extent of amateur egg-collecting and the interchange of eggs both within Ireland and Great Britain, and further afield, then and in previous generations. A socio-historic sketch is provided, together with an account of the more interesting bird’s eggs, their collectors, and the location of collection

The Taxonomic Status of Mazama bricenii and the Significance of the Táchira Depression for Mammalian Endemism in the Cordillera de Mérida, Venezuela.

We studied the taxonomy and biogeography of Mazama bricenii, a brocket deer classified as Vulnerable by the IUCN, drawing on qualitative and quantitative morphology and sequences of the mitochondrial cytochrome-b gene. We used Ecological Niche Modeling (ENM) to evaluate the hypothesis that M. bricenii of the Venezuelan Cordillera de Mérida (CM) might have become isolated from populations of its putative sister species, Mazama rufina, in the Colombian Cordillera Oriental (CO). This hypothesis assumes that warm, dry climatic conditions in the Táchira Depression were unsuitable for the species. Our analyses did not reveal morphological differences between specimens geographically attributable to M. bricenii and M. rufina, and phylogenetic analyses of molecular data recovered M. bricenii nested within the diversity of M. rufina. These results indicate that M. bricenii should be regarded as a junior synonym of M. rufina. ENM analyses revealed the existence of suitable climatic conditions for M. rufina in the Táchira Depression during the last glacial maximum and even at present, suggesting that gene flow between populations in the CO and CM may have occurred until at least the beginning of the current interglacial period and may continue today. Because this pattern might characterize other mammals currently considered endemic to the CM, we examined which of these species match two criteria that we propose herein to estimate if they can be regarded as endemic to the CM with confidence: (1) that morphological or molecular evidence exists indicating that the putative endemic taxon is distinctive from congeneric populations in the CO; and (2) that the putative endemic taxon is restricted to either cloud forest or páramo, or both. Only Aepeomys reigi, Cryptotis meridensis, and Nasuella meridensis matched both criteria; hence, additional research is necessary to assess the true taxonomic status and distribution of the remaining species thought to be CM endemics