Josef Prokop Pražák

Josef Prokop Pražák (born June 22, 1870 in Hořiněves , † July 15, 1904 ibid) was a Czech ornithologist .

Life

At the end of the 1880s, Pražák began his studies in Prague with Antonín Frič . In 1893/94 he volunteered at the Natural History Court Museum in Vienna and later to Bordeaux . He went to Edinburgh for a year in the autumn of 1896 . He then returned to Prague, married and worked as a teacher at private schools, as a grain trader and, for a short time, as a political agitator.

In the course of the 1890s he made a name for himself in the ornithological world through several extensive specialist publications. In it he dealt with the bird world and the history of ornithology in Bohemia as well as with various systematic questions, especially the tits . In 1894 he described the two subspecies blanfordi and newtoni of the great tit , in 1897 the subspecies scoticus of the crested tit . In 1897 he published “On the past and present of ornithology in Bohemia, along with a 'Bibliographia ornithologica bohemica', a contribution to the history of zoology in Bohemia” . His “Attempt at a Monograph on the Palearctic Marsh Tits ” , published in 1895, earned him a great deal of recognition, but also aroused Otto Kleinschmidt's opposition and encouraged him to further studies.

In 1897 and 1898 Pražák brought out the materials for an Ornis of Eastern Galicia , in which he treated 330 species. His claims to have collected thousands of skins and eggs in the vicinity of Lemberg between 1890 and 1896 and to have later evaluated them turned out to be imposture and many facts of the work to be forgeries. In the ornithological world this caused a lot of turmoil and Pražák's reputation as a serious author was ruined. However, he did not appear to make any attempt to refute the allegations made against him. Further work by him was also exposed as suspicious and not published or revised.

Pražák withdrew from the professional public, increasingly suffered from mental confusion and died in 1904 in his hometown of a tubercular disease of the larynx.

literature

• Ludwig Gebhardt: The ornithologists of Central Europe. Summary of volumes 1-4, Aula-Verlag, Wiebelsheim 2006, ISBN 3-89104-680-4 , Vol. 1, pp. 280f.
• Otto Kleinschmidt : JP Pražák † . In: Falco, periodical published after the work “Berajah, Zoographia infinita” . tape 1 , 1905, pp. 103-106 ( online [accessed December 10, 2012]).
• Jiří Mlíkovský: Faunistic work of an ornithological swindler, Josef Prokop Pražák (1870-1904): An assessment. In: Sylvia. No. 48, January 2012.