Bret M. Whitney

Bret Meyers Whitney (born November 27, 1955 ) is an American ornithologist , bioacoustic specialist and director of bird exploration tours .

Life

After the completion of Earlham College in Richmond , Indiana , Whitney abandoned in the 1970s to a PhD - scholarship at Pennsylvania State University and an academic career to the emerging eco-tourism as a field guide for industry and geography, bird watching excursions to take root. In 1985 he was one of the co-founders of the ecotourism company Field Guides in Houston , Texas , which primarily offers bird exploration tours to Brazil . In the following years, Whitney developed into one of the world's leading experts on Brazilian avifauna , who discovered and described numerous new species and subspecies, including the plantation hatchers ( Acrobatornis fonsecai ), Epinecrophylla amazonica dentei (subspecies of the Amazon ant hatchers ), the caatinga ant catcher ( Herpsilochiochi ), the Aripuanaameisenfänger ( Herpsilochmus stotzi ), the yellow breast Ameisenfänger ( Herpsilochmus gentryi ), the black-jacket Faulvogel ( Nystalus obamai ) Thamnophilus stictocephalus parkeri (subspecies of Tapajosameisenwürgers ) and the Divisorameisenwürger ( Thamnophilus divisorius ).

Whitney is a research fellow at the Museum of Natural Science at Louisiana State University and a bioacousticist at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology . He has a special flair for birdcall recordings of undescribed species. This led to the discovery of the Steiniben Madagascar singer ( Cryptosylvicola randrianasoloi ), which Whitney initially only perceived acoustically in November 1992. In December 1992, January 1993 and October 1993 Olivier Langrand , Mike Putnam and Steven M. Goodman collected the type specimens . In 1996, the first scientific description by Whitney, Langrand and Goodman took place.

Whitney has published the animal and bird song audio books Sounds of Neotropical Rainforest Mammals: An Audio Field Guide (with Louise H. Emmons ), Voices of New World Parrots , Songs of the Antbirds: Thamnophilidae, Formicariidae, and Conopophagidae, and Voices of Costa Rican Birds : Caribbean Slope .

Honors and Dedication Names

In 2004, Whitney received the Ludlow Griscom Award from the American Birding Association . In 1995, Luiz Pedreira Gonzaga and José Fernando Pacheco described the Bahia thicket panties as Synallaxis whitneyi . However, a study published in 2014 concluded that Synallaxis whitneyi is a junior synonym of Synallaxis cinerea Wied, 1831 . In 2020 the rump wilt species Scytalopus whitneyi from Peru was named after Whitney.

literature

Bo Beolens, Michael Watkins, Michael Grayson: The Eponym Dictionary of Birds. Bloomsbury Publishing 2014

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ Steven M. Goodman, Olivier Langrand & Bret M. Whitney: A new genus and species of passerine from the eastern rainforest of Madagascar. Ibis 138 (2), 1996, pp. 153-159.
↑ Bauernfeind, E., EC Dickinson, and FD Steinheimer: Contested spinetail systematics: nomenclature and the Code to the rescue. Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club 134, 2014, pp. 70-76.

personal data
SURNAME	Whitney, Bret M.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Whitney, Bret Meyers (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	American ornithologist
DATE OF BIRTH	November 27, 1955

[1] Steven M. Goodman, Olivier Langrand & Bret M. Whitney: A new genus and species of passerine from the eastern rainforest of Madagascar. Ibis 138 (2), 1996, pp. 153-159.

[2] Bauernfeind, E., EC Dickinson, and FD Steinheimer: Contested spinetail systematics: nomenclature and the Code to the rescue. Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club 134, 2014, pp. 70-76.