ERNST MAYR AT 100: A LIFE INSIDE AND OUTSIDE OF ORNITHOLOGY

Auk, The, Jul 2004 by Bock, Walter J

Mayr worked at the Berlin Museum a number of times during university holidays and must have impressed Stresemann favorably, because Stresemann urged Mayr to change his career goals from medicine to ornithology (see Mayr 1980 for his description of his university training and early career). The bait that Stresemann used was the promise that he would arrange an ornithological expedition to some tropical area for Mayr after he completed his degree. That was too much a temptation, and Mayr succumbed to this bribe. he completed his basic preclinical courses, passed the examination for candidate of medicine with all "Is" and became a "Candidate of Medicine," which meant that he could return to medical studies if his plans to become a zoologist did not materialize. Having changed his studies from medicine at Greifswald to zoology at Berlin, Mayr completing his Ph.D. in 16 months (in June 1926) at the age of 21 years, immediately before his 22nd birthday. The rest is history. Had it not been for the chance observation of the pair of Redcrested Pochards in the spring of 1923, Mayr might well have had a career in medicine in Germany, unknown to all of us. But I should mention that he used his abilities and developed his meeting with Stresemann into an invitation to study in Berlin, and thereby had the possibility to change his career to ornithology.

THE NEXT STEPS

Mayr rushed to complete his degree in june 1926 (at the young age of 21) because there was a vacant assistantship at the museum that he could obtain only if he had been promoted and received his Ph.D. Positions were scarce in Germany at that time, a period of rampant inflation. Mayr started his work at the museum, including a cataloguing of journals with his fellow assistant, Wilhelm Meise (Mayr and Meise 1929), and he published his first major taxonomic paper (Mayr 1927) on the systematics of the "snow finches." But he was anxious to travel to a tropical area on an ornithological expedition as promised by Stresemann, who was working hard to find or organize an appropriate one.

The second major chance in Mayr's life stemmed from the close relationships between Stresemann (Berlin), Walter (Second Baron) Rothschild (Tring), Dr. Ernst Hartert (Tring), and Dr. Leonard C. Sanford (New Haven and active patron of the Department of Ornithology, AMNH). Those workers formed a major international axis in ornithological systematics in the early decades of the 20th century. As is well known, Walter Rothschild had been actively putting together the world's largest private collection of birds in Tring, the Rothschild family seat north of London. Leonard Sanford is less known, but as a trustee of the AMNH he can be considered the patron of its Department of Ornithology because he directed funds into the department to collect actively, to construct the present museum wing that houses the department, to purchase the Rothschild collection, and to bring Ernst Mayr to the museum in 1931. In many ways, Sanford is the knight in shining armor of this tale. A major factor in the background of Sanford's efforts was that he was in friendly competition with Professor Thomas Barbour, curator and later director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, to develop the largest and most complete ornithological collection in the United States. Both wished to have a specimen of every genus, if not every species, of bird in the world.