A new specimen record of Rustic Bunting
Emberiza rustica from Turkey
Guy M. Kirwan
ON 13-14 February 1996 Kerem Boyla and I completed an inventory of the remaining bird specimens in the Robert's College, Bebek (Istanbul) collection. We were surprised to discover an immature, possibly male, Rustic Bunting Emberiza rustica, as neither Kasparek (1990) or Mathey-Dupraz (1920-24) list any specimens as being held there. Byers et al. (1995) consider sexing of immature birds problematic. The skin is poorly mounted and badly damaged but clearly identifiable. Despite this the specimen was mislabelled as Pine Bunting E. leucocephalos; it is unclear how and when this mistake originated. A male and female Pine Bunting, fully described by Kasparek (1986) are housed in the collection. As with the vast majority of skins (246 of 248) retained at the college the original label is unavailable. Its provenance is therefore unclear, although it was presumably taken within the environs of Istanbul in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century.
Kumerloeve (1961) erroneously omitted the species from the Turkish list. It was admitted by Kasparek (1990, 1992) on the basis of two untraced specimens obtained by T. Robson between 1861 and 1871 in the Istanbul area as well as an immature male collected by Schrader at Mersin, Içel province on 12 December (between 1882 and 1884). Robson sent an immature female taken at Büyükdere on 24 October 1871 to Dresser (1871) who reidentified the skin as a Rustic Bunting and another, unattributable to year, was apparently shot to the north of the city on 14 February (Kasparek 1990). Kumerloeve (1975) mentions a Rustic Bunting collected by I. C. Parrot (1905) at Pirgos (locality perhaps present day Yuvacõk, Çanakkale province, 40° 05' N 25° 45'E but probably Kemerburgaz, Istanbul province, 41° 09'N 28° 54'E) in north-western Turkey on 24 February 1904.
Neither Schrader or Parrot's specimens were donated to the Robert's College collection, whilst Robson furnished Dresser and several other leading European ornithologists with skins, in addition to maintaining his own collection. It seems unlikely that the less well documented of his two specimens is that discovered by KB and myself. This new specimen therefore brings the number of records in Turkey to five.
It is surprising that there are no modern records from Turkey. In Israel it is a rare but regular autumn migrant (annual maximum nine at Eilat in 1980) with single winter and spring records (Shirihai 1996). There are single records in Syria in October 1974 (Baumgart et al. 1995) and Kuwait in May 1953 (F. E. Warr unpubl.), one or two in the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia in December 1981-January 1982, five in the United Arab Emirates, all since 1985 (Richardson & Aspinall 1996) and three on Masirah Island, Oman between 1974 and 1979 (OBRC 1994). Scott (unpubl.) treated it as a rare and irregular (less than annual) passage migrant through Iran.
Guy M. Kirwan, 6 Connaught Road, Norwich NR2 3BP, U.K.
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