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

Auk, The, Jul 2004 by Bock, Walter J

When he arrived at the AMNH, Mayr immediately became active in the Linnaean Society, a bird-watching club that met at the AMNH. He became as well an honorary member of the Bronx County Bird Club, although a requirement for membership was that one was born in the Bronx; thus he learned North American birds. After moving, in the late 1930s, to the small town of Tenafly in Bergen County, New Jersey, he spent much of his spare time studying birds in that area. When they moved to Harvard and Cambridge, the first thing that Ernst and Gretel Mayr did was to purchase an old farm in Wilton, New Hampshire, where they spent most weekends from early spring until Thanksgiving, and all summers. More important than just providing Mayr a quiet place to write, it gave him the chance to learn the local fauna and flora. Since moving to a retirement home in Bedford, Massachusetts, he has continued to walk and observe birds and learn the natural history of the area.

In the early 1990s, I took Ernst to Cape May, New Jersey, in the early fall. He had not visited Cape May for several decades. On that trip he was able to see his last life-bird, a Gull-billed Tern (Sterna nilotica). He remembered that sighting clearly when I told him that I had seen a flock of well over 100 Gull-billed Terns in the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge, New York, in September 2003. In early fall of 2003, he arranged for a special trip to the Massachusetts Audubon Holly Tree Refuge on Cape Cod to see a flowering Franklinia tree, a species whose history he knew well, but which he had never seen alive. And while writing this article, I told him of a pair of Ravens (Corvus corax) nesting on the Palisades in Tenafly, New Jersey, last year and again this year. His interests were immediately aroused and he wanted to know exactly where, saying that when he lived in Tenafly, he had walked along the river path below the cliffs but never expected Ravens to be breeding there.

FIRST AND LAST INTERESTS

If asked about Mayr's major interests in ornithology, an ornithologist would answer immediately, "systematics and especially species systematics." However, that is not the case. His first and last interest in ornithology is biogeography, as indicated by his doctoral thesis (Mayr 1926) on the northern spread of the Serin (Serinus serinus) in Europe, and his masterful treatment of the historical biogeography of the birds in Northern Melanesia (Mayr and Diamond 2001). The latter is perhaps the most complete geographical analysis of a large group of organisms. His List of New Guinea Birds (Mayr 1941a) deals with the biogeography of those birds, as well as with their systematics and nomenclature. Over the years, he has provided the entire original formulation of "island biogeography" (Mayr 1941b, c), which was tested extensively in his analysis of the birds of the Northern Melanesian Islands (Mayr and Diamond 2001). In his treatment of the birds of Timor (Mayr 1944a, b, c), he was one of the few ornithologists - if not the only one -to apply the (then) new ideas for analyzing the biogeography of birds that were advocated by Stresemann (1939). Although published over 60 years ago, Stresemann's "new" approach to historical biogeography still needs to be summarized and placed into proper context for zoologists. Using a faunistic rather than the traditional regional method, Mayr considered questions such as "What is a fauna?" (Mayr 1965), "What are the boundaries of a biogeographic region?" (Mayr 1944b), "What is the origin of the fauna of a region?" (Mayr 1944b, 1946a, 1972a), and "What are the factors influencing the history of a fauna?" (Mayr 1972b). Mayr's rejection (Mayr 1951) of the original theory of continental drift as Cenozoic connections across the South Atlantic, as proposed by Wegener, was entirely correct, because Wegener's original theory depended on a high rate of continental movement, not just that the continents moved horizontally over surface of the earth. Later theories of continental drift depended on plate tectonics; rates of movement of continents were not an integral part of those theories. Rather, one has to have rather precise information on the position and movements of the continents, the history of the groups of birds, and their abilities to disperse - resulting in continued difficulties to formulate and test historical theories of avian biogeography. In his more than 30 papers dealing with diverse aspects of biogeography, Mayr was able to demonstrate the superiority of the "new biogeographical method," which rapidly became the standard used today.