Ornithology, Evolution, and Philosophy 123

122 3 The New York Years (1931–1953)
but by that time had lost interest in birds. The result was that Mayr himself studied
this splendid collection analyzing at the same time the colonization of Australia
by birds from the Lesser Sunda Islands (p. 181).
Other volunteers were Cardine Bogert (1937), who clarified the migrations of
the New Zealand cuckoo Urodynamis, Eleanor Stickney (1943; later the collection
manager of the Peabody Museum of Yale University), who published on the
northern shorebirds collected by the WSSE in the Pacific and Martin Moynihan
who, in 1946(c), published a paper with Mayr on the evolution of the Rhipidura
rufifrons group (Moynihan later became the director of Barro Colorado Island,
Panama, and made it into a world-class tropical research station), Daniel Marien,
Karl Koopman (later a curator in Mammalogy at the AMNH and an expert on
bats) and Kate Jennings (who made a major contribution to their joint paper on
the variation in Australian bower birds, Mayr and Jennings 1952i). Staff members
using increasingly the Whitney-Rothschild collections included Austin Rand,
Dean Amadon and Thomas Gilliard. Rand was a Research Associate in the Department
of Ornithology—an unpaid position. He was paid by Archbold Expeditions
associated with the Mammal Department. In 1941 he went to his native Canada
and then joined the Field Museum in Chicago in 1947.
Jean Delacour (1890–1985) came to New York after the defeat of France during
World War II and was appointed technical adviser at the Bronx Zoo. This position
left him time enough to work at the AMNH almost every day for several hours.
Mayr and Delacour collaborated from the time of the latter’s arrival in late 1940.
They published several joint articles and the book, BirdsofthePhilippines(1946k)
until Delacour moved to California in 1952 (Mayr 1986m). Their reclassification
(1945e) of the duck family (Anatidae) had a wide distribution and was reprinted
several times.
AOU Politics
From 1931 onward Ernst Mayr attended all or nearly all annual meetings of the
national ornithological organization, the American Ornithologists’ Union (AOU).
He observed the performance and oral contributions critically and compared
their standards with those of the well-known German Ornithological Society.
Together with several other young colleagues, especially H. Friedmann, R. Boulton,
J. Van Tyne, also J. Grinnell and P. A. Taverner he soon set out to modernize the
organization and ornithological research in North America generally. In 1933
already, Mayr was on the Program Committee for the 50th Anniversary meeting
of the AOU held at the AMNH and tried very hard to put together a well-balanced
program. He recommended, for example, that certain zoologists who had been
using birds as their experimental material be invited to present papers at this
meeting. Thus, Professor L.C. Dunn of the Department of Zoology, Columbia
University (New York) spoke on “Heredity of Morphological Variation in Birds”
and Mayr gave a review paper on “The Physiology of Sexual Dimorphism in Birds.”
After the meeting he worked on an unpublished analysis of “The trend of interest