Bacmeister at War

The world changed forever 100 years ago today, and not for the better.

How to trace the cataclysmic fall of western culture without trivializing the deaths of so many?

Let’s try looking at the wartime career of a birder, namely, the jurist and amateur ornithologist Walther Bacmeister. Bacmeister was sent to the field at the age of 40, and served in the German army on both eastern and western fronts. In October 1916, he sent a poetic greeting, entitled “Draussen und Drinnen,” to his colleagues attending the annual meeting of the German Ornithologist’s Association:

For two full years, long ones and difficult / Our iron-hard defenses have stood armed out here. /  They are defending our dear fatherland, / surrounding it with a bronze cord. / Two years, and if it lasts that many years again, / All you enemies will still not attain your goal! / We stand firm in the howling of the storms, / We out here.

As the months come and go, / you at home have not been idle, / You have served, hardy, in silent strength / German science. / Keep building that proud firm structure, / Let it rise high into the blue of heaven, / And crown its cornices in spite of our enemies, / You in there!

After the poem was read to the assembled guests, Anton Reichenow led the cheer for “our ornithologists dressed in campaign gray.”

Reichenow and Bacmeister and most of their colleagues were on the wrong side in a war that didn’t have many right ones. As an officer, Bacmeister had a modicum of leisure to pursue his own interests, as when he was stationed in Strasbourg in spring 1917:

Whenever possible, my time off duty was used for ornithological observation…. When in the early morning of April 27, 1914, I rode through the lavish brush of the Rhine woodlands on the northeastern edge of Strasbourg, I thought to myself that this was a real willow tit landscape. Hardly had I had the thought when I heard the familiar and characteristic “däh-däh,” which I had heard many hundreds of times before in Poland and in northeastern France — in the Argonne, the area of Verdun, and Champagne.

Infamous names in the history of European slaughter, rendered harmless by the presence of a gray parid.

Otto Kleinschmidt, the best known today of Bacmeister’s ornithological friends, provided the best account — nearly in “real time” — of Bacmeister’s collecting activities in the field. In an essay entitled “Miscellany on the Birds of the Enemy Territories Occupied by Us,” Kleinschmidt reported that

The first war souvenirs for my collection were two strikingly gray crested larks from the District of Warsaw. They were followed by both willow and marsh tits, collected on the triumphant march from the Beskids to Brest-Litovsk. The kind donor was Bacmeister…. On January 20 I received my first French willow tit, again from Captain Bacmeister, who had meanwhile returned to the western front after the conclusion of the Serbian campaign. Now shipment after shipment came in from east and west alike. None went missing — this must be emphasized, to the honor of our field post offices — and no bird arrived in unusable condition…. A magnificent series of “war birds” was assembled…. Collecting proceeded according to a system, namely, the focus on material that would be most important for the comparison of the Russian and the French avifaunas.

In the course of a rare leave from the front, Bacmeister was also able to hand over to Kleinschmidt specimens he had collected earlier — meaning, I think, before the war — in France and Poland.

Kleinschmidt commemorated his gratitude to his friend and colleague in the name of a new race of the lesser spotted woodpeckercollected by Bacmeister in the Ardennes in March 1916.

Two males and one female are much more heavily marked than German, English, or north African specimens, such that this is the darkest European form…. I name these pretty birds Picus minor bacmeisteri.

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Kleinschmidt and Bacmeister together described another new taxon from birds collected in the Ardennes and Argonne.

Some of the long-tailed tits of eastern France have reddish upper eyelids in spring. Most are smaller than the subspecies europaea….

They named those birds Aegithalos caudatus expugnatus, “captured in battle.”

In his published writings, at least, Bacmeister appears to have thoroughly enjoyed his war. In a summary of ornithological observations made in eastern Poland, he recalls that

after the happy conclusion of the Easter battle in the Laborez valley in spring 1915, my division and I crossed the ridge of the eastern Beskids…. We passed through all of Galicia from south to north. Unforgettable days! We and our Austro-Hungarian allies had taken back Przemysl and Lwów. As if enchanted, we wandered after many months of spare living through the streets of Lwów, which were thronged by happy, festively dressed people. A joyous welcome was prepared for us.

Bacmeister found his time in the “magnificent city” far too short, but

still it was enough time to pay a thoroughly enjoyable visit to the splendid collections of Count Dzieduszycki, none of which — this must be emphasized — had been damaged by the Russians. It was a great pleasure for me to write my name into the guestbook directly below the names of the Russian visitors. Times change!

Only rarely and incidentally do grim realities intrude:

I encountered considerable numbers of barn swallows in virtually every village and town. In many places their nesting locations had been destroyed by the war. We learned that the Cossacks had sent special troops to burn down the villages that they had occupied and then been forced out of; those troops went from house to house and set the thatched roofs on fire with torches. The fires spread quickly to the entire house and left not much more than the chimney standing. From September 8 to September 21 I encountered migrating house martins.

Unlike so many millions, Bacmeister survived the Great War and returned to a prosperous and busy life in Germany. His family was not so fortunate the next time around, however.

On October 13, 1949, Bacmeister — by then a retired state’s attorney in Stuttgart — wrote to the president of the German Republic, Theodor Heuss, with “a request that is not my request alone, but shared by many who share my same grief.”

Our only son, Arnold Bacmeister, married and 42 years old, a lawyer, has been a prisoner of war since May 1945. He was a paramilitary soldier in Berlin. For three long, long years we knew nothing of his whereabouts or even whether he was still alive. Then, in August 1948, we learned from three separate returning prisoners that he was still living: He was a prisoner in the Buchenwald concentration camp [which had been transformed into a prisoner of war camp by the Soviets after its liberation by the Americans], where he most likely still is, if he hasn’t been sent somewhere else. He knows nothing of our condition or that of his wife, and cannot write; neither can we. This is psychic torture, for him and for us, and we can hardly bear the agony any longer.

Heuss replied, five days later.

Obviously, as you know, the power of the president is limited, and many Germans still live in the belief that all the head of the federal state needs to do is give a directive; they do not understand his authority and its complications. That dreadful fate that finds Germans still captive in the concentration camps of the eastern zone is well known to me from a long series of cases. The delicate position of the German Federal Republic with respect to the reconstruction of eastern and central Germany makes any concrete confrontation politically very tricky. Protest against this situation has, of course, already been registered by all parties. But I will be glad to take your letter as the occasion to raise this matter with Minister [Jakob] Kaiser.

The editors of Heuss’s official correspondence fill in the rest of the story: Bacmeister wrote to the president again in July 1950, after learning that his son had been sentenced to 18 years of prison. Arnold Bacmeister was released sometime between 1955 and 1957; he would publish an autobiography two years before his death in 1994.

Even through those excruciating years, the elder Bacmeister continued to write about birds and birders, ornithology and ornithologists. The family history mentions more than 240 (!) publications, most of them on natural history. He published biographical sketches on Theodor Heuglin (of gull fame) and the great Chilean explorer Christian Luis Landbeck. Of greatest use to the researcher is his bibliography of ornithology in Württemberg through the year 1943,

What are we to think, almost 50 years after his death, of the life and career of Walther Bacmeister? He was a loving father and a member of the Nazi party. He was an ornithological historian and an officer in the armies that devastated northern France.

Nothing’s ever simple, is it?

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Ambassador of the Bright-feathered Throng

Today marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Christian Ludwig Brehm. Father of an even more famous son, Brehm was a dominant figure in continental natural history in the first half of the nineteenth century, a Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher and David Attenborough and David Sibley all rolled into one.

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Brehm was, in both senses, a popular writer on the bird life of Germany and Europe, but his most lasting contribution was likely his personal collection of skins and mounts. Assembled with the help of his sons from two marriages, Brehm’s cabinet eventually included some 15,000 specimens. A generation after Brehm’s death, the birds were purchased by Lord Rotschild, whence they entered the collections of the American Museum 35 years later; some have meanwhile made their way back to German museums.

The importance of that collection to Brehm’s colleagues can be measured in the verse eulogy composed by the poetaster Ph. H. Welcker, who wrote the year after his friend’s death that

His publications commemorate his greatness in scholarship. / As a legacy he has left behind thousands of bird mummies. / And that trove of bird mummies, the envy of foreigners, / Is magnificently and realistically preserved, as if dressed by the hand of God. / Like his writings, that trove remains a witness to a well-lived life / Of inexhaustibly active industry and admirable effort.

This is, by the way, the only German poem I know to use the word “Vogelmumien” twice. (It’s hardly better in the original, but at least it rhymes there.)

Welcker also relates — also in rhymed couplets — a touching incident from Brehm’s funeral. When the casket had been lowered into the ground, a garden warbler burst suddenly into song in the nearby twigs,

You let your sweet full singing roll over the coffin of the man who knew your folk so well. You were the ambassador of your bright-feathered throng, greeting him one last time on the approach to the gates of darkness.

Barred warbler, garden warbler, and blackcap, from Alfred Brehm’s Thierleben

Did it really happen?

Who cares.

 

 

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National Meadowlark Day

Well, if it isn’t, it should be.

Western Meadowlark

On June 22, 1805, Meriwether Lewis wrote in his journal that

 there is a kind of larke here that much resembles the bird called the oldfield lark with a yellow brest and a black spot on the croop.

Lewis and the expedition’s crew knew the eastern meadowlark, “the oldfield lark,” and he observed that these western birds uttered a “note [that] differs considerably” from that familiar bird from back home. But

in size, action, and colours there is no perceptable difference; or at least none that strikes my eye.

And that was that. Lewis and Clark had in fact discovered a new species, the western meadowlark, but apparently thinking it just a variant of the well-known eastern bird, they preserved no specimens and prepared no formal description.

What happened next is well known. In May 1843, John G. Bell, the taxidermist on Audubon’s Missouri River journey, became aware of some

curious notes, without which [the meadowlarks above Fort Croghan, Dakota] in all probability … would have been mistaken for our common species.

On collecting a series of these “quite abundant” birds and comparing them to New York skins of the eastern meadowlark, Audubon — in contrast to Lewis, four decades earlier — determined that

the differences are quite sufficient to warrant me to describe the [western birds] as a new and hitherto undescribed species,

which he named the Missouri meadow-larkSturnella neglecta.

Aud, Oct 7, western meadowlark

That epithet, neglecta, is sometimes taken as another in Audubon’s collection of snide sideswipes at his colleagues and predecessors, but in this case, it is simply a statement of fact. And Audubon frankly includes himself among those naturalists who had overlooked the difference.

When I first saw them, they were among a number of Yellow-headed Troupials [yellow-headed blackbirds], and their notes so much resembled the cries of these birds, that I took them for the notes of the Troupial, and paid no farther attention to them.

Today is the day to be grateful that he and his colleagues eventually did pay attention.

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Barrow’s Birds

John Barrow Monument.jpg
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Cumbria memorializes a famous native son in a limestone tower, designed to recall a lighthouse but more closely resembling, to some eyes at least, a pepper grinder.

I’d like to believe that Sir John Barrow, who was born near Ulverston 250 years ago today, would appreciate more the feathered monuments to his long and richly varied life.

Barrow's Goldeneye

As most Northern Hemisphere birders know, Barrow is the English-language eponym of one of the handsomest of the mergine ducks. Richardson named the bird Anas Barrovii in the Fauna boreali-americana

as a tribute to Mr. Barrow’s varied talents, and his unwearied exertions for the promotion of science.

A high functionary in the British Admiralty, Barrow was a great promoter of Arctic exploration. Though he never saw the American high latitudes himself, his contributions are commemorated in a couple of famous place names, and thus, indirectly, in another bird of Alaska’s Arctic, the glaucous gull named barrovianus by Robert Ridgway in 1886.

Glaucous Gull

Barrow’s career took him to China and South Africa, destinations every bit as exotic as the far north. After returning from Africa, Barrow wrote a memoir of his time there,

in which are described the character and the condition of the Dutch colonists of the Cape of Good Hope, and of the several tribes beyond its limits: the natural history of such subjects as occurred in the animal, mineral, and vegetable kingdoms; and the geography of the southern extremity of Africa,

among other topics. Of greatest interest to birders is the account of a kind of bustard,

much the finest bird we had hitherto met with in Southern Africa, and which, though sufficiently common, is not described in the Systema Naturae. It is called here the wilde pauwe, or wild peacock…. The bird in question is a species of otis, and it is nearly as large as the Norfolk bustard…. the spread of the wings seen feet, and the whole length of the bird three feet and an [sic] half.

It’s clear that Barrow was intimately familiar with this bird:

the flesh is exceedingly good, with a high flavor of game.

Sometime before 1823, John Latham discovered two “most beautifully executed drawings” of a hitherto unknown bustard in the collections of John Dent. Latham suspected that the bird depicted might be “the Wild Pauw, or Wild Peacock, of Barrow’s Travels.” He named it the blue-necked bustard, an English name taken over by John Edward Gray in the species accounts he prepared for Whittaker’s Animal Kingdom in 1829.

Barrow's Korhaan

Gray, too, was uncertain whether Barrow’s description was of the bird seen in Dent’s drawings. Whether it was the same species or not, Gray named it after its (possible) discoverer, Otis Barrowii.

Barrow's Korhaan

Barrow’s Korhaan (not “knorhaan” — that sounds like a soup mix) is now generally considered a subspecies of the white-bellied bustard. The trinomial, though — Eupodotis senegalensis barrowii — still recalls the life and the interests of a man who earned the respect of the natural historians and explorers of his day, and merits a mention even in ours, if not all the time, at least on his birthday.

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Out on the Prairies with Frank Chapman

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I can still lead you right to the battleship gray table in the basement of Love Library where I first made the acquaintance of Frank Chapman. It was thirty-five years ago this fall (thirty-five! years!) that I discovered the wonders of 598.2 C36, with its shocking cover and its weirdly captivating photographs of birds and birders at the turn of the twentieth century.

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The travels Chapman recounts here don’t seem so exotic to me any more; but when I was sixteen, I could hardly imagine ever getting to the places Chapman and his friends got to bird.

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Barrier beaches and Florida heronries, alcids on the California coast and the flamingos of Caribbean islands: it was inconceivable that I should ever be able to witness any of those sites and sights.

Boobies, PUerto P, Sonora, January 24, 2007 090PUerto P, Sonora, January 24, 2007 083

What really got my attention, though, was that when he wasn’t traveling around the bird world with his camera and his shotgun, this famous ornithologist and writer and museum man had actually birded my part of that world, Nebraska.

And he wrote about it in the Camps and Cruises.

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The travels Chapman narrates were all undertaken in the quest for specimens for new habitat groups at the American Museum. In the AutobiographyChapman would wax nostalgic when it comes to prairie-chickens: during his boyhood in New Jersey,

 the desire to form a collection … found expression in gathering the feathers and wings of birds. Of the latter I acquired what I should now term a “large series,” willingly cut by our cook from Prairie Hens which, in season, at that period (1872-1876) festooned butcher shops.

Thirty years later, when birds were needed not under glass but behind it, the eastern chicken — the famous heath hen — was long gone from New Jersey, and trains no longer supplied east coast gourmands with barrels full from the prairies of the west.

When, therefore, I made inquiry of various correspondents concerning a place where I might count on finding Prairie Hens in numbers, I was advised to go to the sand-hills of Nebraska…. [where] the bird proved to be abundant and here, doubtless, it will make its last stand.

Greater Prairie-Chcken

Chapman, accompanied by the principal players in the creation of the museum’s habitat groups — the famous painter Bruce Horsfall and the equally well-known preparator Jesse D. Figgins — arrived in Lincoln on May 1, 1906, where they got their permits in order and were joined by Lawrence Bruner, one of the leading lights of natural history at the University of Nebraska and author of a book I already knew well.

Sandhills

The party must have driven to Halsey (not yet the site of a unit of the Nebraska National Forest), as Chapman says that they reached the collecting site on May 3 and were finished there by May 6; indeed, they were already in Tucson on May 10.

When they arrived on the banks of the Middle Loup, the birders found the northward migration “at its height,” with many passage birds mingling with the local breeders. Like generations of happy observers after him, Chapman was impressed with the mix of typically eastern and typically western birds on Nebraska’s Great Plains:

The Prairie Hen, for example, extends more than half-way across the state where it meets the Sharp-tail Grouse or Prairie Chicken; the Great-crested Flycatcher meets the Arkansas Kingbird, the Blue Jay the Magpie, to mention a few of many similar cases.

Sharp-tailed Grouse

The most abundant species recorded in the sandhills around Halsey was, then as now, the western meadowlark.

Western Meadowlark

Its “hurried, ecstatic, twittering, jumbled” flight song making a big impression on Chapman, so much more used as he was to the “clean-cut fifing” of the eastern meadowlark.

On May 4, Bruner took Chapman and colleagues out to the lek of the greater prairie-chickens, where the easterners

listened for the first time to their booming, with doubtless much the same feeling that an ardent music-lover first hears the voice of a world-renowned singer. The birds were distant about a mile, but their pervasive, resonant, conch-like notes, came distinctly to the ears through the still, clear air.

I distinctly remember my mind’s wandering from that evening’s calculus homework to ponder the meaning of that inscrutable “conch-like.” There was no google for me to consult back then, remember.

Greater Prairie-Chicken

By the way, if you want to bird Nebraska in Chapman’s footsteps, consider joining me next March.

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