Jakob lived at Alexander von Humboldt's side for more than thirty years.

When the researcher asked him: "Which of us will die first?", the answer was: "A lot of sugar, a lot of coffee, Mr. Seifert." This was the information that the servant of the house heard every day.

Jacob was not a Dadaist, but a large Vasa parrot.

The species lives on Madagascar and the Comoros, has a bright face and reaches a length of about fifty centimeters.

Kai Spanke

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Humboldt first encountered the bird when he was visiting Goethe.

At that time, Jakob still belonged to Carl August von Sachsen-Weimar, who finally bequeathed it to the scientist in 1828.

By this point, the parrot had got around quite a bit.

For example, he lived with the later Bavarian King Maximilian I, who bought him from a soldier in Strasbourg.

He in turn had acquired the animal on Réunion.

Though the bird died in 1859, he's still something of a C celebrity to this day.

As a specimen he sits in the Berlin Natural History Museum and fulfills the role of a mascot there.

Without the Humboldt Connection, the stuffed animal would have been disposed of and not restored after it was damaged by a shell during World War II.

Back then, everything that could fly was killed

Ornithologist Karl Schulze-Hagen, photographer Klaus Nigge and taxidermist Jürgen Fiebig come up with stories like this, in which historical, biological and anecdotal elements are intertwined, in their book “Vogelwelten”.

They provide an outline of the history of the collection and conservation techniques, show excellent photographs of skins, eggs and birds preserved in alcohol, present scientists and five outstanding collections.

In addition to the Berlin Museum of Natural History, you will roam the Natural History Museum in Vienna, the Frankfurt Senckenberg Museum, the Alexander Koenig Research Museum in Bonn and the Naumann Museum in Köthen Castle.

The foundations of current ornithological findings, according to the thesis that is always present in the background, were laid in the natural history museums of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

There are forty-three scientific bird collections in Germany, each with more than a thousand specimens.

While contemporary ornithologists sit in the laboratory or set off with binoculars and a camera, their predecessors shot everything that moved out of the air.

The conservation methods were also more radical at the time.

A pretty red-foot Atlas widow prepared by Jean-Baptiste Bécœur around 1750 is in immaculate condition to this day only because it was protected from vermin with arsenic.

As a result of this poison cure, around three thousand eighteenth-century bird skins still exist in European natural history museums.

hides and intestinal worms

Early on, collections aimed to be as complete as possible.

The British banker and zoologist Walter Rothschild owned the largest and most modern of its time in Tring, England.

From the late nineteenth century he collaborated with the German ornithologist Ernst Hartert.

Together the two collected three hundred thousand bird hides.

Such an urge to complete, which also involved hoarding several specimens of the same species, can pay off.

This is illustrated by the story of the insecticide DDT: Seventy years ago, peregrine falcon populations in the northern hemisphere suddenly collapsed because the eggshells of the birds of prey were getting thinner and thinner.

However, entire "time series of falcon eggs" were stored in the museum inventory, the shells of which could be examined for thickness and DDT content.

Small portraits of well-known and lesser-known ornithologists complete the volume.

The reader encounters engaging figures such as Johann Natterer (1787 to 1843).

He roamed around Brazil as an explorer for almost twenty years, published no text, described his activity as clearly "not Humboldtian" and sent twelve thousand three hundred bird skins and more than seventeen hundred vessels with intestinal worms (including his own) to the imperial court in Vienna.

Natterer discovered more than two hundred bird species, but came home too late and had to accept the humiliation that the animals had already been described by a few colleagues.

One looks with amazement at Ferdinand Lucas Bauer's (1760 to 1826) natural history illustrations, the accuracy of which is still beyond any doubt, as well as the research activities of Emilie Snethlage (1868 to 1929), who was one of the first women in Germany to receive a doctorate and a could prepare the perfect hummingbird hide in fifteen minutes.

Anyone who wonders why natural history museums are still important today and what kind of people risked their lives on completely insane expeditions to find a few birds for European collections can look forward to an enjoyable read.

Klaus Nigge, Karl Schulze-Hagen and Jürgen Fiebig: "Bird Worlds".

Expeditions to the Museum.

Knesebeck Verlag, Munich 2022. 240 p., ill., hardcover, €40.