) was an Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

n ornithologist.

Life and work

Hellmayr was born in Vienna

Vienna

Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

 and studied at the University of Vienna

University of Vienna

The University of Vienna is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. It was founded by Duke Rudolph IV in 1365 and is the oldest university in the German-speaking world...

, although he did not finish his degree. After his studies he worked in Vienna, Munich, Berlin, Paris, Tring (England), and Chicago.

He spent the years 1905-08 studying Baron Rothschild's

Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild

Lionel Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, Baron de Rothschild FRS , a scion of the Rothschild family, was a British banker, politician, and zoologist.-Biography:...

 private collection of natural history specimens at Tring, near London. There he received guidance from the German ornithologist Ernst Hartert

Ernst Hartert

Ernst Johann Otto Hartert was a German ornithologist. Hartert was born in Hamburg. He was employed by Lionel Walter Rothschild as ornithological curator of his private museum at Tring from 1892 to 1929....

.

In 1908 Hellmayr was appointed Curator of the Bird Department at the Bavarian State Museum, which he had helped organize in 1903 and where he became a specialist in Neotropical birds, studying Johann Baptist von Spix

Johann Baptist von Spix

Dr. Johann Baptist Ritter von Spix was a German naturalist.Spix was born in Höchstadt, Middle Franconia, as the seventh of eleven children. His boyhood home is the site of the Spix Museum , opened to the public in 2004...

's collection of Brazilian birds.

Main Work

In 1922 he was made Curator in Zoology at the Field Museum in Chicago

Chicago

Chicago is the largest city in the US state of Illinois. With nearly 2.7 million residents, it is the most populous city in the Midwestern United States and the third most populous in the US, after New York City and Los Angeles...

. He stayed there until 1931. His books included 13 of the 15 volumes of the Catalogue of Birds of the Americas (1918–1949), a work initiated by Hellmayr's predecessor, Charles B. Cory

Charles B. Cory

Charles Barney Cory was an American ornithologist and golfer.-Biography:Cory was born in Boston. His father had made a fortune from a large import business, ensuring that his son never had to work. At the age of sixteen Cory developed an interest in ornithology and began a skin collection...

. With Henry Boardman Conover

Henry Boardman Conover

Boardman Conover was an American soldier and amateur ornithologist.Conover was born in Chicago and studied at the Sheffield Scientific School in Yale. He had an interest in natural history from an early age, and collected bird specimens...

 he published The Birds of Chile.

In 1931 Hellmayr went back to Vienna. After the Nazi takeover

Anschluss

The Anschluss , also known as the ', was the occupation and annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany in 1938....

 of Austria in 1938, he was arrested and briefly jailed for reasons that are not fully known but probably related to his unsympathic views toward the Nazi party (Hellmayr did not make political statements in public, but his interest – as an amateur historian

Historian

A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all history in time. If the individual is...

 – in the French Revolution

French Revolution

The French Revolution , sometimes distinguished as the 'Great French Revolution' , was a period of radical social and political upheaval in France and Europe. The absolute monarchy that had ruled France for centuries collapsed in three years...

shows that he was more than casually interested in such topics). After his release he emigrated with his wife to Switzerland. Following a long period of declining health he died in 1944 in Orselina, near Locarno.

Historian Francois Vuilleumier writes that "Hellmayr's pivotal role was first and foremost to bring order to [the] nomenclatural chaos" of his day that had resulted in erroneous citations and hindered analysis of species and genera.