Plain Leaf Warbler
Phylloscopus neglectus Hume, 1870
Photo © By Charles J. Sharp - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=31336293
STATUS
Eurasia. Monotypic.
OVERVIEW
Species not admitted nationally (BOU 1971).
NOT PROVEN
0). Pre 1911 Argyll Tiree, shot, undated.
(J. A. Harvie-Brown, Ibis 1911: 576).
[Not in BOU, 1971].
History J. A. Harvie-Brown of Dunipace House, Larbert (1911) in The Ibis, Vol. LIII. p. 576, in a Letter dated 17th June 1911, says: 'Some time ago Mr. Eagle Clarke took to Tring the wing of a small species of Phylloscopus in order to identify the bird to which it belonged, but there was no species represented in the Tring Museum with which it could be compared. I have several times told Mr. Eagle Clarke that I was myself personally satisfied that I had diagnosed it correctly as belonging to the race P. neglectus of Hume, which that ornithologist found in Cashmere. I have the other wing here. It absolutely agrees in the formula of the wing-pattern with Mr. H. E. Dresser's formula given in his Birds of the Eastern Palearctic Region (p. 98). The specimen of which these are the wings was shot in Tiree by Mr. Peter Anderson and sent in the flesh to me. But the Post Office stamper had utterly destroyed it, crushing in both head and most of the back, whilst part of the tail-feathers had been shot away. Only the wings were saved. The feathers of the lower back showed a dusky brownish olive - not greenish olive. In the crushed head there was just the suspicion of a pale superciliary streak. There are no wing-bars.
Should my diagnosis, from the wing alone, be correct, I think I may claim to have here recorded the first occurrence of this species in Britain, and perhaps its first occurrence in Europe. The only specimens known to me are Hume's own specimens in the British Museum, and Dresser's, now in the Manchester Museum.'
