François Haverschmidt (ornithologist)

François Haverschmidt (born June 21, 1906 in Utrecht , † April 28, 1987 in Zwolle ) was a Dutch ornithologist and governor of Suriname .

Life

Haverschmidt was the son of François Haverschmidt senior and Catharina Jacoba Johanna Verbroeck. He also had an older sister. His father was a judge in Utrecht. His grandfather François Haverschmidt was a minister and a well-known writer under the pseudonym Piet Paaltjens . Haverschmidt had a great admiration for his grandfather. He kept an archive of publications about him and on his last public appearance in December 1986 Haverschmidt attended the unveiling of Paaltjens bust in Leeuwarden .

Haverschmidt was a member of the Club van Trekwaarnemers (German about: "Club of (bird) Zugbeobachter"), a group of young bird watchers founded in 1919 , to which his older friend Jan Verwey (1899-1981) belonged. This association shaped ornithological field work in the Netherlands between the world wars. In 1924 he became a member of the Nederlandsche Ornithologische Vereeniging (NOV). In 1925 Haverschmidt's first article appeared in the ornithological journal Ardea , which he had provided with his own photos. After Verwey left the club's secretariat in 1927 and moved to India , Haverschmidt took over its duties. He was responsible for the sections “breeding birds” and “migratory birds” in the magazine Ardea and regularly published articles either alone or in collaboration with Gerrit Anton Brouwer . His contributions spanned a wide field including faunistics , nesting behavior, feeding behavior, migration , bird protection and even ornithological heraldry . His main focus was on meadow and marsh birds, especially the white stork , in which he documented a rapid decline after 1939. Other articles he published on the golden plover , the black-tailed godwit , the cormorant , the gull , the Tern , the black tern , the Spoonbill , the Little Gull , trading plovers' eggs , the woodpecker and the lesser spotted woodpecker , the tree falcon and the owl .

In July and August 1926 Haverschmidt undertook his first voyage from Rotterdam to Barcelona and back, and in June 1928 he visited Hungary , where he in the Kis-Balaton nesting egrets photographed. He carried out all these ornithological activities in his spare time, in addition to his initial studies of law at the University of Utrecht and his later legal career as a clerk at the district courts in Utrecht (until 1936), Haarlem (1936–1938), Heerlen (1938–1941) and Leeuwarden (1941-1946).

At the beginning of 1946 he took up the position of judge at the court in Paramaribo in Suriname, which he accepted mainly with the motivation to pursue his ornithological interests. Despite the pioneering work of the Penard brothers and Charles Chubb at the beginning of the 20th century, Suriname's avifauna was still largely unexplored. Working conditions in Suriname were completely different from those in the Netherlands. The most elementary ornithological work, the species inventory, had yet to be carried out. Identification literature in the modern sense did not exist for South America. The most important literature available to Haverschmidt was the two-volume work De vogels van Guyana (Suriname, Cayenne en Demerara) by Frederik Paul Penard and Arthur Philip Penard and the two-volume work The Birds of British Guiana by Charles Chubb. In many cases, the only way to identify species was to collect material and send it to museums outside the country. First, John Todd Zimmer of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City did most of the identification work. After Zimmer's death in 1957, it took place mainly in the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie in Leiden . Haverschmidt's collection consists of about 9800 specimens of 540 species.

Haverschmidt's 22-year field work culminated in 160 publications and finally in 1968 in his magnum opus The Birds of Surinam , which was illustrated by Paul Barruel . In 1994 Gerlof Fokko Mees published a revised new edition of the work.

Haverschmidt was also President of the Supreme Court and held the office of interim governor of Suriname three times : 1963, from 1964 to 1965 and 1968. Haverschmidt was also active in the field of nature conservation. He was chairman of the committee that advises the government of Suriname on hunting and nature conservation issues. After his retirement in 1968, he made several trips to Suriname until 1981.

Haverschmidts Bibliographe includes around 350 ornithological articles, mainly in American ( The Auk , Condor , Wilson Bulletin ), Dutch ( Ardea , Wandelaar , Buiten ), German ( Journal for Ornithology , Bird World , Contributions to the Reproductive Biology of Birds ) and British journals ( Bulletin of the British Ornithologists' Club , British Birds ). He has authored six ornithological books, including Faunistische overzicht van de Nederlandsche broedvogels (1942), The Life of the White Stork (1949), List of the birds of Surinam (1955), The Black-tailed Godwit (1963), Birds of Surinam ( 1968) and The Black Tern: Chlidonias niger (1978). In 1973 he published August Kappler as an ornithological collector and observer in Suriname from 1836–1879 and in 1976, in collaboration with Alex JP Raat, the biography of Biographical notities concerning ornithological verzamelaars in Suriname in het begin van de 19e eeuw, Mr. Charles François Mirandolle (1789 –1841), Mr. Adriaan François Lammen (1767–1847) / Alexander von Humboldt and Coenraad Jacob Temminck .

Haverschmidt was a corresponding member of the American Ornithologists' Union (1950), the German Ornithologists' Society (1964), the British Ornithologists' Union (1967), an honorary scientist at the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie (1973), recipient of the Golden Spoonbill of the Nederlandse Vereniging tot Bescherming van Vogels (1982) and finally honorary member of the Nederlandse Ornithologische Unie (NOU) (1986). The appreciation for his professional career was reflected in his appointment as Knight of the Order of the Dutch Lion and Officer of the Order of Orange-Nassau .

Haverschmidt was married twice. First marriage with Antoinette Hendrika de Graaff and, from 1950, second with Willy Liong A San.

literature

• Gerlof F. Mees : In Memoriam Mr. François Haverschmidt (1906–1987) In: Ardea No. 76, 1988, pp. 211–221 (Dutch)
• Gerlof F. Mees: In Memoriam Mr. François Haverschmidt (1906–1987) In: The Auk 105 (2), April 1988, pp. 368–369 (English)

Web links

• Literature by and about François Haverschmidt (ornithologist) in the bibliographic database WorldCat