First report on bird species collected by two Brazilian museums at Distrito Federal , central Cerrado

A list of unpublished records of bird species collected in Brazil’s Federal District was elaborated. It included specimens deposited in collections of the Museu de Zoologia da Universidade de São Paulo, in São Paulo, and of the Museu de Ornitologia, in Goiânia. Employees of these two museums collected a total of 94 species in Brasília and Planaltina, mainly during the 1960s. Eleven of these species were considered by previous publications as having no specimens collected in the Federal District. Two species (Knipolegus cyanirostris and Pachyramphus castaneus) had not been recorded at the Federal District by previous studies.

Avian inventories at Brazil's Federal District were initiated with a collection made by E. Snethlage near Planaltina, in the 1920s (Snethlage, 1928).The next expedition to this Cerrado region was conducted during the construction of Brasília (Sick, 1958).Published records of posterior collections were less expressive, concerning few species (Ruschi, 1959;Sick, 1979).
The fi rst checklist of bird species found in the Federal District brought important data on habitat use by 429 species, but provided no information on which species had been collected (Negret et al., 1984).More recently, Bagno and Marinho (2001) elaborated a checklist of 451 species, in which species that had specimens collected and deposited in ornithological collections of national museums were identified.
However, Bagno and Marinho (2001) did not include in their work the bird collections of the Museu de Zoologia da Universidade de São Paulo and the Museu de Ornitologia de Goiânia.
This study aimed to report on bird specimens deposited in the ornithological collections of these two museums in order to improve knowledge on the species composition found in the Federal District.
The Federal District of Brazil is situated in central Cerrado.Vegetation associated with water courses, such as gallery forests, wet grasslands and marshes, usually occurs in valleys.Uplands are dominated by open vegetation, including cerrado sensu stricto, campo cerrado, campo sujo and campo limpo.Forests (cerradão and dry forests) also occur in uplands, as small patches (Eiten, 1972).Altitudes in the region range from 750 to 1,300m above sea level.The climate is strongly seasonal, with most of the annual precipitation (mean of 1,500mm) falling from October to April.The dry season usually occurs between May and September, and precipitation can be zero during some months.Other general information about the region can be found in Eiten (1972).
The ornithological collections of two Brazilian museums were considered in this study: 1) Museu de Zoologia da Universidade de São Paulo (MZUSP), in São Paulo; 2) Museu de Ornitologia de Goiânia (MOG), in Goiânia.Their registration books were researched in August and November 2000, respectively.In February (MOG) and April (MZUSP) 2007, the skins of some of the specimens were examined to confi rm identifi cation.This inspection included only species (with "*" in Table 1) considered as having no birds collected in the Federal District by previous literature (Bagno and Marinho, 2001).The nomenclature and sequence of bird species followed Sigrist (2006).
MZUSP houses skins of 38 species collected in Brasília and 48 species obtained in Planaltina.They total 77 species collected during the dry seasons of 1963 and 1979 by Hidasi, Ollala and Dente (Table 1).On the other hand, MOG obtained 21 species in Brasília during several months between 1958 and 1985, and four species in Planaltina in June and July 1963.Together, they total 25 species collected by Hidasi in the Federal District (Table 1).Therefore, a total of 94 species were collected by MZUSP and MOG in the Federal District.The majority of these species were collected by Hidasi in the early 1960's.Eleven of these species (followed by an asterisk in Table 1) had been considered by the most recent checklist (Bagno and Marinho, 2001) as having no specimens collected in the Federal District.Two of these species had not been reported for the Federal District by previous literature.They are:

Pachyramphus castaneus
Considering the exhaustive list elaborated by Bagno and Marinho (2001), recent records of three bird species at Estação Ecológica de Águas Emendadas (Lopes et al., 2005), and the results of my study, a richness of 456 bird species has been found to date in the Federal District.Although the Federal District harbors the most studied avifauna in the Cerrado region (Silva, 1995), further collections and inventories are necessary for a better knowledge of its bird species composition.