The overlooked collection of Ludwig Kaiser and a little- known report on birds of Nauru

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The overlooked collection of Ludwig Kaiser and a little-known report on birds of Nauru

The avifauna of Nauru has received scant attention over the past nearly 130 years since Otto Finsch reported the five species he observed on 24 July 1880 (Finsch 1881). Pearson (1962) recorded at least 16 species over a period of six months in 1961, and he stated that Finsch’s work comprised ‘the only previous ornithological literature available concerning Nauru’. King (1967) and Garnett (1984) merged seabird records from Nauru with those from the Gilbert Islands (Kiribati), without stating which may have pertained only to the Gilberts. More recent checklists of Nauru birds (e.g. Owen 1977, Pratt et al. 1987, Cain et al. 1997) cite Pearson (1962) as a primary reference. However, none of these mentions an article that appeared in the notes section of volume 2 of the Journal für Ornithologie describing a collection of birds from Nauru made by Ludwig Kaiser in 1900, nor is this article mentioned in either of the two bibliographies of Nauru (Krauss 1970, Pollock 1994).