Henri G. Dirickx

Henri Georges Dirickx (born April 23, 1928 in Antwerp , † February 5, 2013 in Geneva ) was a Belgian entomologist .

Life

Dirickx was enthusiastic about birds and insects, especially butterflies and dragonflies , from an early age . During the summer, his parents rented a house in Zoute in West Flanders , where he went bird watching in the region's salt marshes and made the acquaintance of Count Léon Lippens . At the age of 15 he was sent to boarding school in Brussels to do his A-levels and learn French. He then enrolled at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel and became a civil engineer . From 1948 to 1952 he worked as an independent ornithologist at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren. During this time, his first four publications, which dealt with birds, were published between 1948 and 1950. In 1949 he described the subspecies Lamprotornis acuticaudus katangae of the wedge-tailed gloss star , which was synonymous with the nominate form by Dean Amadon in 1962 . In 1953 he married the French woman Monique Macaux after studying architecture for two years at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris . In the same year Dirickx joined a bridge construction company in Brussels. In 1954 his daughter was born and in 1957 his son. After the death of his father, he moved back to Antwerp with his wife and children, where he took over the management of the family business, a leather wholesale company. In the early 1960s, Dirickx devoted to entomology and 1964 his first entomological article appeared entitled reinforced bijdrage tot de study van de Melitaeinae (Lep. Nymphalidae) uit het Franse Middellandsezeegebied in the journal Tijdschrift van het Kontaktkomité van de Kringen voor Natuurstudie en Natuurbescherming in het Antwerpse .

The Permanent Mission of Belgium to the United Nations in Geneva contacted Dirickx about a post on the Economic Commission for Europe . He traveled to Geneva a few times before being permanently hired in 1974. In 1988 he retired. In the Muséum d'histoire naturelle de la Ville de Genève he studied the entomological collections intensively. He also became a member of the entomological societies in Switzerland and Geneva and remained a member of several Belgian and French entomological societies. The family of hover flies (Syrphidae) became his research focus. Between 1992 and 2012 he published twelve papers on European and African species of this family, including an article in 2010 on five new species of the genus Allobaccha from Madagascar . In 1998 he published a detailed catalog on the synonymy and geography of hoverflies, which summarizes previous work on this family as well as revisions of various genera, including Spheginobaccha , Melanostoma and Allobaccha .

In 2005 and 2006 Dirickx donated its collections of dragonflies and butterflies to the Muséum d'histoire naturelle de la Ville de Genève, which consist of around 400 and 1,379 specimens, respectively. Over the years he donated many specimens of two-winged birds to the Geneva Museum of Natural History . His hoverfly collection, including 3400 copies, was bequeathed by the family to the same institution after Dirickx's death, according to his will.

Dedication names

In 2013, the entomologist F. Christian Thompson named the hoverfly species Ceriana dirickxi from Zimbabwe in honor of Henri G. Dirickx.

literature

• Bernard Landry, Chritelle Mougin: Henri G. Dirickx (23 avril 1928 - 5 fevrier 2013). Announcements of the Swiss Entomological Society = Bulletin de la Société Entomologique Suisse = Journal of the Swiss Entomological Society Suisse, Volume 86, Issue 3–4, 2013 (obituary, French)

Web links

• Literature by and about Henri G. Dirickx in the WorldCat bibliographic database