Ornithology, Evolution, and Philosophy 123

112 3 The New York Years (1931–1953)
near Grand Manan Island, which he had bought and intended to give to Bowdoin
College as a nature reserve and field station. Particularly surprising were the large
numbers of nesting Eider Ducks along the coast and the colony of Leach’s Petrels
at higher elevations. It was the beginning of the breeding season and males had
selected their nesting holes and were “singing” to attract a female. In the spruce
forest they observed Tree-Creepers, Golden-crowned Kinglets, nesting juncos,
and Myrtle Warblers. Arctic Terns also nested on the island and dive bombed the
visitors. From Kent Island they went by boat to another island to visit one of the
colonies of the American Puffin. They could have stayed longer on Kent, but Mayr
was anxious to get back to New York because Gretel Simon was due to leave for
Germany. Two years later she became his wife.
When the 6th Pacific Science Congress took place in San Francisco in August
1939, Ernst and Gretel Mayr crossed the continent by train from New York to
California. In Santa Fe (New Mexico) they lunched with R. Meyer de Schauensee
of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences who, with his family, spent a vacation
there. At that time, Mayr prepared, jointly with him, an account of the birds of the
Denison-Crockett South Pacific Expedition. From here the train went to Arizona,
where they changed to another one that took them to the Grand Canyon. They
arrived in the dark and were immediately housed in a cabin. When they stepped
out next morning they were only about fifty yards away from the rim of the canyon.
Mayr always considered this one of the two most impressive sights in his whole
life. The other was the cave of Lascaux in France.
In Pasadena they were to meet Th. Dobzhansky who, at that time, was an
assistant professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).
They asked a taxi driver to take them to a “moderately priced” hotel. Instead, he
took them to the famous luxury hotel, the Huntington where, greatly amused, the
reception clerk let them have a room for $5.00 (which, at the normal rate, was in
the order of $30–50). When Dobzhansky came to pick them up the next morning,
he would not dare, with his old car, to drive up to the Huntington, and instead
left it around the corner. Much to the entertainment of the clerks, they carried
their suitcases down the street to Dobzhansky’s car. They stayed another night
in a less expensive hotel and then continued to San Francisco and Berkeley. The
Mayrs and Dobzhanskys had a splendid time together in Pasadena and renewed
their friendship (p. 133).
AldenH.Miller expectedtheminBerkeley and,over thedurationofthecongress,
took them repeatedly with his car into the surroundings for sight-seeing and
birdwatching. The Pacific Science Congress was held in San Francisco and at
Stanford University in Palo Alto. Over a weekend they visited Monterey Peninsula
and Yosemite Park. On their way back to New York the Mayrs stopped at Denver,
Colorado where Adolf and Gwendoline Ley accompanied them on several trips
into the Rocky Mountains. He was the “founder” of the “community living” at 55
Tiemann Place in upper Manhattan in 1932 and had moved to Colorado after he
got married. Ernst went also birdwatching near Denver with Alfred M. Bailey of
the Natural History Museum. His next stop was in Iowa City to visit Professor Emil
Witschi (1890–1971), an endocrinologist from Switzerland, who proved that the