Anyone who thinks wolves are bloodthirsty beasts has eaten wrong information ”: The first sentence that Carl-Albrecht von Treuenfels wrote on December 8, 1973 on the FAZ's“ Germany and the World ”page was of programmatic foresight.

Half a century later, the predator that was once ostracized has become man's best friend.

Treuenfels saw the animals come and go.

In the end, he also had to apply the incorruptible sober look of the nature lover to his own dwindling strength: On Tuesday, Carl-Albrecht von Treuenfels, one of the most prominent conservationists in the world and one of the most loyal freelancers of this newspaper, died in Lübeck at the age of 82 .

Alfons Kaiser

Responsible editor for the section “Germany and the World” and the Frankfurter Allgemeine Magazin.

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His last email came from the intensive care unit on Sunday.

The cold diagnosis of his critical condition was followed in a self-forgotten sense of duty by the quick pan to his life's task: "I would have liked to have written you an article on the creeping disappearance of the buzzard from the landscape, on which I have already collected a lot of material." The subjunctive says more than a thousand words about how important it was to him to protect endangered animal species and to preserve shrinking habitats.

Neither simple enthusiasm for nature nor cheap opposition to industrial agriculture was his thing: he knew the hunters, he knew the farmers, he dealt with them every day.

Around 500 articles with well over 500 photos

He was even the son of a farmer himself. In a sense, nature conservation was a biographical mission. Because his parents' estate in Mecklenburg was expropriated, he grew up in rural Schleswig-Holstein and began nature photography at school in Ratzeburg. After studying law, he worked as a lawyer and advertising manager in Frankfurt. But he couldn't get away from his homeland, if only because the animal photographer knew where to lie in wait. No wonder that he was particularly taken with the birds that can be seen so well in the North and Baltic Seas - and that he moved back to the north from Frankfurt when he left his professional duties behind in 2008.

At first, however, Frankfurt had proven to be a good biotope for him. Because from the Senckenberg Society for Nature Research and the zoo to its director Bernhard Grzimek with his television program on Hessischer Rundfunk, a lot of expertise came together here. From the beginning of 1990 to the end of November 2004, Treuenfels was Chairman of the Board of Management and President of WWF Germany, which had had its headquarters in Frankfurt since 1978. With an excellent international network, he developed the environmental foundation from a species protection organization to a nature protection organization that operates projects all over the world. Frankfurt was also a good fit because it could tirelessly solicit sponsors for environmental protection. The most striking example is the protection of cranes, for whose promotion he won Lufthansa, the “crane line”.Time and again he went from observer to designer - and also planted hedges on his own land, created breeding biotopes for birds and advertised flower strips at the edges of fields.

The FAZ offered him a forum for this for almost half a century.

In around 500 articles with well over 500 photos, he reported from all corners of the world.

In more than a dozen books - "As long as they are still alive" (1973), "They all need living space" (1987), "Among pandas and penguins" (1994) - he made nature conservation popular.

Be it sheaths in Antarctica, mongooses in Southeast Asia, cheetahs in the savannah or Siberian deer: he wrote about animals not from an academic distance, but from the perspective of the observer who had lain for hours early in the morning in the damp grass or in the bushes.

A forerunner of the ecological movement

When he started, the Greens didn't exist yet, nobody thought of Greta. He was a forerunner of the ecological movement. With the almost inexhaustible energy of the pioneer, he fulfilled his life's work. His last article was posted here on June 11th. It was about fawns, young rabbits and birds, which increasingly fell victim to the mowers in the spring due to the changeable weather.

Again, it was not a cheap accusation against agriculture, which no longer stutters through the grass with a mini cutting unit, but in third overdrive with a 15-meter mower. He knew that the farmers had to get going quickly at an intermediate high and that the hunters hardly had time to bring animals to safety. His questions are all the more piercing: Shouldn't the farmers give notice at least 24 hours in advance? Shouldn't they keep cutting heights of 15 centimeters? Why can't you work with drones more often? Many have heard his questions, far too few have answered yes.