Though I'm generally very appreciative of SACC's work, I agree with you on this one. It's probably high time for a new proposal to be submitted, I doubt it would fail this time.This proposal was a real low point for SACC. Instead of applauding Whittaker's amazing rediscovery, they made false accusations about his work and took that moment away from him.
That proposal was rejected following this comment from Mark Robbins, who said: 'His assessment seems solid; however, I would want to see photos of the holotype (note that Kevin hasn’t examined the holotype), and although I don’t doubt Andy Whittaker’s observation, regardless of the party involved, it is a sight record.'
As Laurent Raty mentioned, there are actually photos of the holotype in Whittaker 2008. Robbins clearly had not read that paper when making declarations about its contents in his comments. The other committee members followed Robbins' comments and so none of them seems to have read the paper either. It is truly exasperating, astonishing, that a committee like that will make things up and reject the solid proposals of colleagues in the field, without having the courtesy of reading their works.
Robbins is the same guy who voted twice to recognise Bogota Sunangel (now a well documented hybrid, with only one specimen and no field observations) and also the same guy who voted against recognising Antioquia Brush-Finch (now considered a well documented valid species).
Now with further evidence of this Tityra being a valid species, the committee's awful judgment calls on these sorts of matters is further exposed.
I imagine SACC could continue to argue that this might be a colour morph of Masked Tityra or Black-crowned Tityra and that there are no sound recordings. But differences in plumage (for both) and the red bare skin (for Masked) are pretty striking. Tityra do tend to be seen just perching or feeding silently. Also e.g. there are just 39 recordings on xeno-canto of Black-crowned Tityra, which is a widespread species, and those are all uninteresting chips or snarls, so I am not convinced that song is an important character in this group, compared with morphology:
Black-crowned Tityra (Tityra inquisitor) :: xeno-canto
xeno-canto.org
It remains a very mysterious bird though, even now that many more birders are visiting its range there are still just a handful of records, pretty unusual for a conspicuous bird such as a tytira
