Leonid Alexandrovich Portenko

Leonid Portenko ( Russian Леонид Александрович Портенко , scientific. Transliteration Leonid Aleksandrovich Portenko * 11. October 1896 in Smela , Kiev Governorate , Russian Empire ; † 26. May 1972 in Leningrad , USSR ) was a Russian ornithologist and Zoogeograf , the right to earned mainly by studying the bird life of the northern and northeastern Palearctic .

Live and act

Portenko was born in 1896 as the son of a geodesic in the Ukrainian city ​​of Smela, where he attended the classical high school. He then began studying with the then famous Russian ornithologist Mikhail Alexandrowitsch Menzbier at the Moscow State University . From an early age he was interested in nature, prepared, drawn or painted in oil. From 1926 he received his doctorate at the ornithological department of the Zoological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Leningrad . The management of the same was held by Pyotr Petrovich Sushkin , who exercised a significant professional influence on him. In 1929 he moved to the Institute for Arctic Research for the following decade. In 1940 he returned to the ornithological department, where he worked until his death.

During his entire professional life, Portenko traveled extensively and thus contributed significantly to the study of the Palearctic bird life. In his early years he devoted himself to the bird life of the Dnieper , Podolia and the Black Sea coast . During his time at the Institute for Arctic Research, he mainly visited the less explored areas of northern Russia and Siberia such as the northern Urals , Novaya Zemlya , the Taimyra and Anadyr regions, the Chukchi peninsula , Wrangel Island , the Koryak region and Kamchatka as well as the Kuril Islands . From his expeditions he brought back extensive field notes and numerous drawings, photos and hides of birds and mammals, which are now kept in the collections of the National Academy.

Between the extended expeditions he made trips to the Carpathian Mountains , the Caucasus , the Ukraine , Kazakhstan and Central Asia .

Portenko published the results of his field work in over 100 specialist articles and extensive monographs . The bird fauna of the extra- polar part of the northern Urals appeared in 1937, and in 1939 in two volumes The fauna of the Anadyr region . Shortly before and after his death, the two-volume work The Birds of the Chukotka Peninsula and Wrangel Island was published in 1972 and 1973 . Under the direction of Portenko, the four-volume reference work The Birds of the USSR was created until 1960, the last two volumes of which on the Passeriformes (1954 and 1960) he wrote entirely himself.

Together with Erwin Stresemann and Gottfried Mauersberger , Portenko founded the Atlas of the Distribution of Palaearctic Birds , which has been published by Akademie Verlag since 1960 . In the Journal of Ornithology , he published articles on previously little researched Limikolenarten Northern Siberia such as spoon-sandpipers , sickle sandpipers and gray-breasted sandpipers .

In addition to his research, Portenko worked as a university professor, study director and organizer and took an active part in the Soviet ornithological congresses and specialist committees. He maintained close connections with the ornithologists of the Baltic States . He was a member of the Baltic Commission for Bird Migration Research and from 1958 curator of the reopened ornithological station in Rybatschi on the Curonian Spit . Portenko also had good relations in the West and represented the USSR at international specialist congresses, including several times a member of the International Ornithological Committee . He was an honorary member of the German Ornithologists 'Society (since 1963), the American Ornithologists' Union and numerous organizations in his home country.

literature

• Eerik Kumari: Leonid Alexandrowitsch Portenko 1896–1972 , Journal für Ornithologie , Volume 115, Issue 3, July 1974, pp. 365–367, doi: 10.1007 / BF01644330

Web links

• Department of Ornithology (with a photo by Portenko), Zoological Institute, Russian Academy of Science, St. Petersburg, accessed December 10, 2012
• Atlas of the distribution of Palaearctic birds at the University of Mainz, accessed on December 10, 2012