On the validity of the northern subspecies of the Sri Lanka Frogmouth <i>Batrachostomus moniliger roonwali</i> Dutta 2009

Dutta (2009) described a new subspecies roonwali of Sri Lanka Frogmouth Batrachostomus moniliger from Karnataka based on specimens in the collections of the Zoological Survey of India (ZSI). As this description has not found wide concurrence, we evaluated the specimens against the media available online as 800+ photographs as well as specimens in museums. We found the diagnostic features listed by Dutta (2009) are not consistent with the larger sample of material available to us and hence recommend the subspecies be considered as not valid.