3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

32 1 Childhood and Youth
– Convergence versus phylogenetic relationship in birds: (1) significance of food,
bill, etc. (2) significance of subsoil and climate (pigmentation), (3) significance
of mode of life (sense organs, legs, claws, wings, etc.);
– Biology and relationship; nest building, feeding, voice, courtship, sociology,
birds and plants, diurnal and nocturnal mode of life, migration instinct, number
of broods and eggs, molt, wintering areas, direction of migration, proportion
of males and females during migration, care of young, ecology, race formation,
variability, differences of males and females in size and coloration;
– Influence of age, temperature, weakness, irritants, poison, etc. on the determination
of sex (in plants);
– Fragrance of flowers: (1) Which flowers of our flora are fragrant? (2) During
which months and at what time of the day are they visited by which insects?
(3) Definition of fragrance (4) Repellents (mercaptane, ether), (5) Organs producing
odor, (6) Elimination of all optical markers, e.g., cut off flowers.
Originally, it was necessary to study five semesters before one could take
the cand. med. examinations. Mayr had planned to stay in Greifswald for three
semesters and do the next two semesters at Tübingen University. While he was in
his second semester, a new regulation permitted taking the cand. med. only after
four semesters. Therefore he decided he should finish in Greifswald. In February
1925, Mayr passed his pre-clinical examinations with straight “A”s in all six subjects,
a rare achievement. When he again visited Berlin and his “beloved Zoological
Museum” (entry in an early notebook), Dr. Stresemann persuaded him to switch
to zoology and to major in ornithology, partly by promising to place him on an
expedition to the tropics later on. This was a temptation Mayr could not resist,
particularly because by that time, certain doubts had been growing in his mind
regarding medical practice as his lifelong occupation. Within the field of medicine,
he could see himself only as a researcher in one of the basic medical sciences (early
notebook). Stresemann gave him at once the topic for his dissertation: “The range
expansion of the Serin finch Serinus serinus in Europe.” He started work during
his last semester in Greifswald, now registered as a student of zoology. In the fall,
he transferred to the University of Berlin where, in October 1925, he participated
in the annual meeting of the DOG (see the group photograph in Haffer et al.
2000: 431). Stresemann remarked in a letter to O. Kleinschmidt on 19 August 1926,
“I am placing great expectations in his further scientific development.” Without
Mayr’s chance observation of the pair of rare ducks at Moritzburg, which led to his
encounter with Dr. Stresemann, he probably would have become and “withered
away” as a medical doctor (p. 30) somewhere in Germany, perhaps known only to
the local community of birdwatchers.
The biweekly meetings of the DOG comprised a lecture, usually with slides, or,
alternately, a special session (Fachsitzung) when recent literature was reviewed.
Most of the new books and monographs were introduced by Stresemann himself,
others by his graduate students. When Mayr was asked to discuss a recently
published avifauna of a region in Bavaria, authored by a most distinguished local
ornithologist, the medical doctor J. Gengler, he simply presented a long list of all