ERNST MAYR AND SOUTHWEST PACIFIC BIRDS: INSPIRATION FOR IDEAS ON SPECIATION

Ernst Mayr's empirical research at the American Museum of Natural History between 1931 and 1953 was focused largely on speciesand genus-level systematics in the rich but then little-known bird fauna of the Southwest Pacific. Here, through four case studies, I trace the enormous advances he made in systematics knowledge, practice, and theory, culminating in his development of the Biological Species Concept, with its supporting treatise, Systematics and the Origin of Species (Mayr 1942). Resumen.La investigacion empirica de Ernst Mayr en el Museo Americano de Historia Natural entre 1931 y 1953 se enfoco principalmente en la sistematica a nivel de especies y generos de la avifauna rica pero entonces poco conocida del sudoeste del Pacifico. En este ensayo, a traves de cuatro estudios de caso, recapitulo los enormes avances que el hizo sobre el conocimiento, la practica y la teoria de la sistematica, culminando en su desarrollo del concepto biologico de especie, con el tratado que lo avala, Sistematica y el Origen de las Especies ("Systematics and the Origin of Species", Mayr 1942). In 1929, the grand old man of systematic ornithology in Europe, Ernst Hartert, wrote the 25-year-old Ernst Mayr a prophetic letter. "There is no other place in the world," wrote Hartert, "more favorable for the study of speciation in birds than the Solomon Islands" (Mayr and Diamond 2001). Mayr was then in the Solomons as a member of the American Whitney South Sea Expedition and on the brink of heady events. Fresh from taking his doctorate under Erwin Stresemann in Berlin and groomed unwittingly to take over from Hartert at the great Rothschild collection in Tring, England, Mayr was on prolonged field work in Melanesia. In 1928, he had been in West Papua (formerly Irian Jaya or West Irian), putting together a collection of 2,700 bird skins that included two new species (Hartert 1930, Mayr 1930). Then he moved to the mountains of the Huon Gulf in Papua New Guinea, where he stayed until he joined the Whitney Expedition in 1929. In 1930, Mayr returned to Germany, but by January 1931, he was at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York to ^-mail: richard.schodde@deh.gov.au curate and write up the Whitney Expedition collections (Bock 1994, 2005; LeCroy 2005). At almost the same time, events in Europe changed the global balance of research power in systematic ornithology: the financially troubled Lord Walter Rothschild sold his huge collection to the AMNH in February 1932 (Rothschild 1983). Both the Rothschild Museum and the Whitney Expedition had focused on the bird faunas of the Southwest Pacific; their combined holdings made them, by far, the most formidable research collections for this region. And Mayr was given sole responsibility for working up and inventorying the faunas and their novelties. Although it was the end of serious field experience for him, the knowledge already gained still gave him, with his Bildung education and training under Stresemann (Haffer 2002, Bock 2005), his first platform for beginning an intellectual career in systematic ornithology and, ultimately, evolutionary biology. In his first year at the AMNH, Mayr published 14 papers, some of them carried over from his previous year in Berlin but 7 based directly or extensively on Whitney Expedition material. Over the next 22 years at the museum, he produced more than 200 further publications, including four books. Most of this prodigious