Josef von Seilern and Aspang

Josef Karl Franz Maria Johann Nepomuk Count von Seilern and Aspang (born November 25, 1883 at Lešná Castle near Zlín , Moravia ; † August 18, 1939 there ), sometimes just known as Josef Seilern , was an Austrian ornithologist and oologist .

Life

Count Seilern was the owner of the Lukov and Kralic estates and the Litschau hunting lodge in Lower Austria . After attending school in Kalksburg and Kremsier , he studied agriculture in Hohenheim from 1907 to 1908 and in Munich in 1909 . As a child he already collected eggs and nests on the family estate and, due to his visits to his father's hunting lodge on Lake Neusiedl , he was also familiar with the avifauna of the lake. After the death of Maximilian Kuschel (1851–1909), Josef Graf von Seilern and Aspang was induced by Adolph Nehrkorn to purchase 9,000 eggs from Kuschel's second collection. Seilern was primarily interested in the neotropical avifauna. In connection with the Bavarian State Collections in Munich, he sent collectors to various regions of South America. He published the results of these expeditions partly in collaboration with his friend Carl Eduard Hellmayr . In 1911 he became a member of the German Ornithological Society . Seilern made several trips. The first took him to Corsica and Spitsbergen, another in 1909 to Japan and from 1929 he took part in two world trips. In addition to his own rich harvest, Seilern's main taxidermist Richard Homberg brought hides and eggs from his expeditions to Mallorca, Albania and Rhodes and thus contributed significantly to the expansion of the collection at Lešná Castle. In 1939 Seilern owned 42,000 eggs of 3,200 species and 25,000 skins, one of the largest private collections in Europe. It originated from the Nearctic , Palearctic and Neotropical and included in particular hummingbirds or newly discovered taxa. The exhibition of the local bird fauna, which was housed in a separate building and open to the public, was no less extensive. In his castle park he raised hunting pheasants, various deer species and emus. In 1986 Seilern's collection was acquired by the Natural History Museum Vienna . As an author, Seilern published only a few works, including the "Contributions to the Ornithology of Venezuela" and "Comments on the Birds of Southeast Peru". Josef Graf Seilern also described some subspecies of the scarlet-headed bearded bird ( Eubucco tucinkae ) and the black-headed ant bird ( Percnostola lophotes ).

Dedication names and honors

In 1917 Ernst Hartert and Arthur Thomas Goodson honored Seilern in the epithet of the subspecies Dendrocolaptes picumnus seilerni of the dark- beak tree climber ( Dendrocolaptes picumnus ). Emil Hachler (1910-1996) described in 1952 Emberiza schoeniclus seilerni , synonymous with the nominate form of reed bunting and Maurice Sassi (1880-1967) in 1937 troglodytes troglodytes seilerni , a synonym for a subspecies of wren ( Troglodytes troglodytes cypriotes ( Bate , 1903 )). A street in Litschau is named after him.

literature

• Obituary (by CE Hellmayr) In: Ibis 4, 1940, pp. 353–354 (English)
• Ludwig Gebhardt: The ornithologists of Central Europe. AULA-Verlag, Wiebelsheim 2006, ISBN 3-89104-680-4 .
• Ernst Hartert, Arthur Thomas Goodson: Notes and descriptions of South American Birds . In: Novitates Zoologicae . tape 24 , 1917, pp. 410-419 ( biodiversitylibrary.org ).
• Emil Hachler: Nová rasa strnada rákosního z Moravy . In: Stráž Myslivosti . tape 30 , 1952, pp. 178 .
• Moriz Sassi: Troglodytes troglodytes seilerni nov. subsp. In: Ornithological monthly reports . tape 45 , 1937, pp. 87 .

Web links

• Website of the Seilern family
• Joseph Karl Franz Maria Johann Nepomuk, Count von Seilern and Aspang at geneall

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Ernst Hartert u. a, p. 416.
2. ↑ Emil Hachler, S. 178th
3. ↑ Moriz Sassi, p. 87.