3 The New York Years (1931–1953)

Expeditions to New Guinea and the Solomon Islands 51
To be honest, I virtually never before had a gun in my hands, and of course had
never shot at a flying bird. The result could have been predicted. I missed every
pheasantthatgotupinfrontofmeonChilternHillswhileHartert,inspiteofhis
age, brought down most of those that I had missed. I rather suspect that Hartert
begantodoubtmysuccessasabirdcollector,butitwasreallytoolatetoreverse
history.
On that occasion and again when, after New Guinea I had gone to the Rothschild
Museum to study birds, I frequently encountered Lord Walter Rothschild. I was
surprised how shy he was. When Hartert and I were talking and looking at some
specimens and Rothschild arrived he stayed at the door until Hartert asked him
to come in and join us in looking at the specimens. He had an unbelievably good
memory. In my New Guinea collection I had a specimen of a Poecilodryas species,
which Hartert had never seen. Rothschild said, oh this was illustrated by J. Gould
in his Birds of New Guinea, plate 84. Hartert got the volume out of the library, and
lo and behold, Rothschild was right, it was on plate 84 4 . I am sure he could have
toldusforeveryotherplatenumberwhatspeciesitwas.
He was a mountain of a man, well over 6 feet tall and extremely heavy. His mother
had a special comfortable chair built for him, and every morning Rothschild went
to the library where the chair stood, backed against it and then let himself drop
into this comfortable seat. It had special steel reinforcement because whenever
Rothschild sat on another chair it would collapse. This had happened in the Hartert
household. Therefore also Mrs. Hartert offered a special chair constructed with
steel reinforcement, on which Rothschild sat whenever he visited the Harterts.”
In early February, 1928, Mayr left Germany all by himself to lead—as it turned
out eventually—a three-partite expedition to New Guinea and Melanesia of over
2 years. During this entire period he was on leave from the Museum of Natural
History without salary payments from that institution (receiving only about 200
Marks per month from the expedition funds). He returned to Berlin in the first days
of May 1930 resuming his duties as an assistant curator at the Museum of Natural
History. These three expeditions were administratively independent undertakings
and explored the following regions (Fig. 2.4):
(1) Papua Province, Indonesia, or Irian Jaya, former Dutch New Guinea (Arfak,
Wandammen and Cyclops Mountains), for the Rothschild Museum in Tring,
England, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York; February
1928–October 1928; financed in equal measure by these institutions; for reports
see Mayr (1930f, 1932e) and Hartert (1930);
(2) Papua New Guinea, the former German Mandated Territory (Saruwaget and
Herzog Mountains) for the Museum of Natural History in Berlin; November
1928–June 1929; supported by the German Research Foundation (Notgemeinschaft
der Deutschen Wissenschaft); for a report see Mayr (1931l)
4 This was probably plate 6 of Part XVI illustrating Poecilodryas bimaculata (Black-and-
White Flycatcher), which is currently placed in the genus Peneothello. Mayr (1931l: 680)
had collected a female of this species at “Sattelberg.”