Eugene Eisenmann and the Study of Neotropical Birds

Abstract

Eugene Eisenmann was born in Panama in 1906 and lived there for his first 10 years. His father was born in Philadelphia, his mother in Panama, and his family was prominent in Panamanian affairs; Gene always retained a deep interest and affection for his native country. He came to the United States for his early schooling, and after graduation from DeWitt Clinton High School in New York City, he entered Harvard College in 1 923. He continued at Harvard Law School, and after receiving his degree, commenced legal practice with a prestigious New York firm with which he retained a long affiliation as Senior Partner. He was secretly proud of having argued successfully before the U.S. Supreme Court. In 1956 he retired from his law firm to assume a full-time career in ornithology as Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History; this continued until his death on October 16, 1981. Those are the minimal biographical facts about a remarkable person who has had a profound impact on ornithology in the Americas and influenced generations of investigators of the birds of that region. By his own account, Eugene Eisenmann's early and casual interest in birds did not take a more serious turn until 1 9 1 9 at a summer camp in the Adirondacks, when he was only 1 3. Before a visit to Panama in 1 923, he prepared his own field guide consisting of crayon drawings based on Ridgway's and Salvin and Godman's volumes and modelled after the pictures in Chester Reed's primitive booklets. His interest languished during his college and law school years, only to revive after he had settled into legal practice in the late 1930's. This revival was sparked by his participation in National Audubon Society field trips, acquaintances with John Bull, Allan Cruickshank, and Roger Tory Peterson, and especially membership in the Linnaean Society of New York, which held meetings at the American Museum. In the wartime 1 940's, attendance at the Society's meetings was small but included ornithologists of great distinction, among them, members of the museum staff. In addition to those previously mentioned, the participants included Dean Amadon, James Chapin, Joseph J. Hickey, Robert Cushman Murphy, and Ernst Mayr, who was then editor of the Society's publications. Eisenmann received great intellectual stimulation from a talk by Mayr on bird speciation, based on Mayr's forthcoming book, Systematics and the Origin of Species (1 942). He was also deeply impressed with Hickey's and Mayr's views on the importance of the contributions of amateurs to serious ornithological work, and was to become one of the most important of the serious amateurs, i.e., those originally pursuing a professional career in a field other than the biological sciences. Eisenmann continued to practice law with great success, but he devoted more and more time to ornithology and longed to do so on a full-time basis. He visited Panama almost annually, and in 1952 his first major publication, Annotated List of Birds ofBarro Colorado Island, Panama Canal Zone was issued. The prosaic-sounding title perhaps does not suggest a landmark contribution, but the study proved exceptionally valuable. Barro Colorado Island, formerly a large hill rising out of the lowlands, was formed by the gradual flooding of Gatun Lake from 1 9 1 2 to 1 9 1 4. The new island was designated a biological reserve in 1923. Its potential for ornithological study was soon recognized, but Eisenmann's 1952 paper was the first comprehensive account of the birds of the island. For 27 years his paper constituted the principal ornithological source for research by zoogeographers, population ecologists, environmental physiologists, and other ornithologists studying the avifauna of this unique biological preserve. Since 1979, a revised edition of the island's avifauna, coauthored with Edwin O. Willis, has become the standard reference. The two publications are of particular importance because they provide for the recognition and documentation of changes in species composition and individual abundance in a rich natural environment that became an island at a precisely known time, thus providing an excellent testing ground for theories of island biogeography and population dynamics. Eisenmann's summarizing accounts