3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

106 3 The New York Years (1931–1953)
to get back to the car. But Holt got confused with the trails and pretty soon was
utterly at a loss which way to turn. We met another hiker, and as an old New Guinea
hand (none of us were smoking), I borrowed some matches from this man. Well,
eventually it turned dark and we still didn’t know where we were. We stumbled
along for another hour or two in the dark, but having lost the trail on a bare rocky
outcrop and having fallen over trees, etc., we finally decided we had to stop and
make a camp. In the meantime it had started to rain and we had quite a bit of
trouble getting a fire started, with the matches I had fortunately begged. We spent
a miserable night being hot from the fire on one side and freezing in the back. We
had left all our warm clothing in the car. Poor Holt was terribly upset because he
was married and he knew his wife would worry. After a long and miserable night,
dawn finally came, and in due time we found a way out to a road and eventually
to our car. The story, of course, got around that the two famous explorers, Holt
of Brazil fame and Mayr of New Guinea fame had gotten lost ‘in the outskirts of
New York City’ and this finally led to a write up of our adventure even in the New
Yorker.”
In 1938, Mayr spent again three months in Europe and visited various museums
to study the types of New Guinea birds in conjunction with the preparation of his
monograph, the List of New Guinea Birds, which was published in 1941. He sailed
from New York on SS “Europa” on 3 May and returned on SS “Deutschland” on
5 August 1938. Mayr’s first visit to Europe after World War II took place during the
period April–August 1951, when he gave a series of lectures in Italy, Switzerland,
France, Denmark, Britain and Germany having become famous through his 1942
book. He met many of his old friends, especially Erwin Stresemann in Berlin.
In later years he has, of course, returned to Europe many times to participate in
symposia and international congresses, and to visit his relatives.
Both daughters went to primary and high school in Tenafly and were already
teenagers, when Ernst Mayr accepted an Alexander Agassiz professorship at Harvard
University in 1953. At that time he sold his home in Tenafly to his old friend
Reimer Koch-Weser, one of his former roommates at 55 Tiemann Place.
Birding around New York City
On many weekends Mayr went out birding in the surroundings of New York City,
usually with other members of the Linnaean Society, the local bird club which
a group of naturalists had founded in 1878. There he met Charles Urner (1882–
1938) and his New Jersey group and the members of the Bronx County Bird Club
(BCBC) some of whom had cars and took him along on their trips, eventually
accepting him as a member under the name of “Ernie” (Farrand 1991, Barrow
1998: 193). The major criterion for membership in the BCBC was one had to be
born in the Bronx. Therefore Mayr was nominated “honorary member” (as well
as Roger T. Peterson, author of the field guides, and William Vogt, later editor
of Audubon Magazine). In May 1933 Mayr bought his own car, “a second-hand