Acta Zoologica Cracoviensia, 11() 1966
Uwagi o zbiorze jaj ptasich Kazimierza Wodzickiego (sen.)
[Remarks on the Oological Collection of Kazimierz Wodzicki Sen.]
Abstract:
SUMMARY The oological collection discussed in this paper took origin in the years 1845-1856 and it consists of 2309 eggs belonging to 276 avian forms, mainly species (in two cases sub-species were treated by Wodzicki separately as distinct species, namely, Corvus corone corone and C. c. cornix, as well as Anser arvensis arvensis and A. a. brachyrhynchos). The inventory of the collection made on the basis of the labels is presented on pp. 3-27. Doubts concerning the identification or provenience of specimens are discussed in annotations. The data of the list are arranged in the following order: full Latin name in the form binding at present with synonyms used to describe the given specimen on the labels added in square brackets, then after a colon the date, the place of collecting, the name of the collector in round brackets (if the specimen was obtained by exchange, and the names of the collectors who received the other eggs of the clutch), and in the end the number of the now existing specimens. The lack of any of these data is marked with a question mark. The data about particular clutches are separated with a semicolon. In the section on the history of the collection the author discusses, among other things, the exchanges of specimens made by Wodzicki with different Polish and foreign collecters such as Taczanowski, Dzieduszycki, Kjarbölling, L. Thienemann, Parreyss, Moeschler, Koenig Warthausen and others. In 1865 Wodzicki presented the whole collection to the Jagiellonian University and this, in turn, passed it over to the Polish Academy of Sciences in Kraków in 1874. There, it has been kept up to the present time and together with the Museum of Natural Sciences it makes up the collections of the Institute of Systematic Zoology, Polish Academy of Sciences. The final section of the paper deals with the changes in the distribution of birds, as they stand out on the basis of the data obtained from the collection. Three species were taken close to the borders of their present ranges: Ardea purpurea (near Brzeżany), Luscinia luscinia and Lanius minor (both in the Kraków region). Several other European species were collected outside the present ranges. The more interesting of these cases are illustrated on the maps. The places where the eggs of Stercorarius parasiticus (a, b), Nycticorax nycticorax (c, d) and Falco cherrug (e, f) were collected are plotted against the present ranges in Fig. 1. Fig. 2 shows the same for Charadrius apricarius (a, b, and с — presumably the border of the range in the middle of the nineteenth century) and Falco naumanni (d, e) and Fig. 3 for Strix uralensis (a, b) and Lanius senator (c, d) (e, f, and g are the places where this species nested in Poland and was observed in the breeding season). The author concludes with a discussion on a few species whose eggs, according to the labels, came from Greece (Ammomanes deserti), Iceland (Buteo lagopus, Bucephala clangula and Calidris testacea) and Greenland (Falco columbarius, Eremophila alpestris, Fringilla montifringilla and Montifringilla nivalis), and therefore from regions where they do not breed nowadays. As regards these species, a mistake was made in the identification of Calidris testacea, and the eggs so identified belong most likely to Calidris alpina, whereas the egg of Bucephala clangula may have been confused with B. islandica. The other determinations are good and the eggs conform to the descriptions in the literature. However, it seems that only Falco columbarius and Eremophila alpestris could nest in Greenland, as given on the labels, in the middle of the last century, in the other cases the data sound too improbable and for this reason I regard them as mistakes.
