George Schaller

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George Schaller at a lecture at the Beijing Zoo on August 10, 2005

George Beals Schaller (* 1933 in Berlin ) is a German-born American zoologist , naturalist and environmentalist.

Life

George Schaller was born in Berlin in 1933 as the son of a German and an American. Together with his mother and brother, he emigrated to St. Louis , Missouri , in the USA in 1947 . He began his academic training at the University of Alaska Fairbanks . During this time he read the book A Sand County Almanac by ecologist Aldo Leopold . An expedition to northeast Alaska under the leadership of Olaus J. Murie in the summer of 1956 also proved to be formative. Schaller also met his future wife Kay at the University of Alaska. In his early work, Schaller mainly devoted himself to ornithology .

For postgraduate studies, Schaller moved to the University of Wisconsin – Madison , where he initially worked under the ornithologist John T. Emlen. It was Emlen who drew Schaller's attention in 1957 to a project initiated by Harold Coolidge to research gorillas in their habitat. On February 1, 1959, George Schaller and his wife Kay left for the Congo for this purpose. Emlen and his wife accompanied the expedition until July 16 of the same year. Previously, next to nothing was known about the life of the mountain gorillas . Schaller was the first to study the behavior of mountain gorillas in detail in the wild, thereby increasing our knowledge of gorillas considerably. His twenty-month gorilla research resulted in a dissertation, the scientific work The Mountain Gorilla and his first popular science book The Year of the Gorilla . Schaller's observation results laid the foundation for the long-term observations by Dian Fossey and her successors.

The Schallers first visited the Serengeti in 1960. A few years later they returned to study lions and cheetahs from Seronera from June 1966 to September 1969 . In the 1970s, the American writer Peter Matthiessen met Schaller in East Africa . The two went to the Himalayas together in 1973 , where they wanted to watch snow leopards . Matthiessen wrote a non-fiction book about the expedition entitled The Snow Leopard , which received the US National Book Award twice . In 1996, Schaller was awarded the International Cosmos Prize and in 2015 the Hubbard Medal of the National Geographic Society .

Fonts

  • Birds of the Upper Sheenjek Valley, Northeastern Alaska. (with Brina Kessel) In: Biological Papers of the University of Alaska. No. 4, May 1960.
  • Breeding behavior of the White pelican at Yellowstone Lake, Wyoming. In: Condor. Vol. 66, No. 1, 1964, pp. 2-23.
  • The mountain gorilla. Ecology and Behavior. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago / London 1963.
  • The year of the gorilla. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1964. German translation by Alfred P. Zeller: Our closest relatives . Scherz, Bern / Munich / Vienna 1965.
  • The Serengeti Lion. A study of predator-prey relations. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago / London 1972. Received the National Book Award.
  • A kingdom of predators. (Abridged version of The Serengeti Lion )
  • Golden shadows, flying hooves. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1973. German translation by Hans Schmidthüs: Unter Löwen in der Serengeti . Herder Verlag, Freiburg / Basel / Vienna 1986.
  • The Giant Pandas of Wolong. (with Hu Jinchu, Pan Wenshi & Zhu Jing) The University of Chicago Press, Chicago / London 1985, ISBN 0-226-73643-1 .
  • The last panda. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago / London 1993. German translation by Kurt Neff: The last panda. Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg 1995, ISBN 3-498-06292-1 .
  • Wildlife of the Tibetan steppe. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1998.

literature

  • John Allen: A voice in the wilderness . In: OnWisconsin Magazine. Summer 2010, accessed March 22, 2015.
  • Bernhard Grzimek: Foreword. In: George B. Schaller: Among lions in the Serengeti. My experiences as a behavioral scientist. Herder Verlag, Freiburg / Basel / Vienna 1976, ISBN 3-451-17483-9 .
  • Peter Matthiessen: The Snow Leopard . New York 1978. German translation: On the trail of the snow leopard. The journey to a forgotten land. Scherz, Bern / Munich / Vienna 1980, ISBN 3-502-15460-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i Allen (2010): A voice in the wilderness.
  2. ↑ See also Kessel & Schaller (1960): Birds of the Upper Sheenjek Valley, ...
  3. ↑ Schaller (1965): Our closest relatives. P. 9.
  4. ↑ Schaller (1965): Our closest relatives. Pp. 21 & 125.
  5. ↑ a b : Kelly J. Stewart, Pascale Sicotte & Martha M. Robbins: Mountain gorillas of the Virungas: a short history. In: Martha M. Robbins, Pascale Sicotte & Kelly J. Stewart (eds.): Mountain gorillas. Three decades of research at Karisoke. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2001, ISBN 978-0-521-78004-9 , pp. 1-26.
  6. ↑ a b George Schaller: Among lions in the Serengeti . Herder Verlag, Freiburg / Basel / Vienna 1986. p. 17.
  7. ↑ Cosmos Prize: The Prizewinner 1996. ( Memento of the original from March 5, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. At: expo-cosmos.or.jp , accessed on September 25, 2015 @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.expo-cosmos.or.jp
  8. ↑ Virunga National Park Rangers to Accept National Geographic Explorers of the Year Honor . National Geographic Society Press Room, June 10, 2015.
personal data
SURNAME Schaller, George
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Schaller, George Beals (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American zoologist, naturalist, and environmentalist
DATE OF BIRTH 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin