3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

138 3 The New York Years (1931–1953)
ornithologists. During his regular visits to Germany he met, besides Stresemann,
with many colleagues, especially Gustav Kramer (1910–1959) and Konrad Lorenz
(1903–1989) who also visited him in the United States, with Fritz Frank (1914–
1988), Günther Niethammer (1908–1974) and Klaus Immelmann (1935–1987).
Immelmann had participated in an expedition with Mayr to the interior of Australia
which Dom Serventy had organized in 1959 and Immelmann’s interests in ethology
were close to Mayr’s. When the DO-G held its 100th annual meeting in Bonn in
1988, Ernst Mayr attended as the keynote speaker.
Mayr also established close ties with the German Zoological Society, the German
Society for the Theory and History of Biology, and the German Society for
Biological Systematics all of which elected him as an Honorary Member.
The July issue of the Journal of Ornithology for 2004 was dedicated to Ernst
Mayr on the occasion of his 100th birthday which he enjoyed greatly: “What is
particularly impressive is the range of interests of the contributors and the large
number of new findings. German ornithology is obviously very much alive […]
A good omen for the future!”
International Ornithological Congresses
As mentioned in previous chapters, Ernst Mayr attended, when possible, the meetings
of local and national ornithological societies in Germany and in the United
States and frequently gave lectures at these meetings. He was also a regular attendant
of the International Ornithological Congresses (IOC) which take place every
4 years: Amsterdam (1930), Oxford (1934), and Rouen (1938; lecture on the sex
ratio in birds). Between these congresses he carried on an active correspondence,
e.g., with E. Stresemann and other leading ornithologists, about presidents to be
nominated, about the place and organizational details of future congresses. Because
of legal problems with his passport (p. 251), he did not attend the 10th IOC in
Uppsala, Sweden (1950), but R.C. Murphy read his progress report on “Speciation
in birds” (Mayr 1951l). At the 11th IOC in Basle (Basel, 1954) Mayr lectured on
the bird fauna of the table mountains of southern Venezuela (with W.H. Phelps,
Jr., 1955f) and in Helsinki (1958) he organized a symposium on adaptive evolution
(1960e). In Ithaca (1962) he was the President of the XIIIth Congress and spoke on
“The role of ornithological research in biology” (1963r). From that year on he was
a permanent member of the International Ornithological Committee. He attended
the IOCs in Oxford (1966), where six presidents posed for a photograph (Fig. 3.12)
and Mayr received an honorary PhD from Oxford University, The Hague (1970;
chairman of the symposium on “Causal zoogeography”) and Canberra, Australia
(1974; chairman of the symposium on “The value of various taxonomic characters
in avian classifications”). At the 17th IOC in Berlin (1978) he gave the Stresemann
memorial lecture on “Problems of the classification of birds” and at the 19th IOC in
Ottawa (1986) he reported on “The contributions of birds to evolutionary theory.”
In view of his advanced age he did not attend the congresses in Moscow (1982)
and in New Zealand (1990) but did travel to Vienna in 1994 (21st IOC), when