Animal life

Alfred Brehm was one of the numerous German and Western European researchers from the end of the nineteenth century.
An architect and zoologist who devoted his entire life to researching the animal world on almost all continents. His life’s work, “Brehm’s encyclopedia of animals”, was created as the essence of all the records he collected during his life in an unimaginable volume, one part of which he inherited from his late father, a pastor from Rentendorf. The villagers in the village knew him as the “birder pastor” and whom many still consider the founder of German ornithology. Bram was truly a distinct personality. What adorns this extraordinary man, and what sets him apart from other naturalists of the time, is his writing skill and incredible sense of aesthetics and art.

He made all his sketches and representations of certain species with his own hand in copper engraving, which were later illustrated in his collections. The skill of writing was most likely due to his mother, who read poetry to him every night before going to bed in his early childhood.
Growing up in a harmonious family, in a place surrounded by the forests of Thuringia, Brehm really had the opportunity to base his love for nature on a good place and to grow into a good man with a strong will.
I can’t even imagine the amount of energy that man put into his life’s mission, wanting to convey to us his own experience of the mysterious animal world, which is still a great mystery to this day.
I can say with certainty that Brehm is one of the most important people in the world of zoology. His contribution is timeless, because even today when you read it, he almost never comes up with “assertions”, but is constantly based on descriptions and observations. It is obvious that his awareness during the research was at a high level, where he did not want to use the claim. This is also one of the reasons why his records are still usable today, unlike many others and even the claims of Darwin himself.
And yet in addition to all these facts, Brem has been somewhat forgotten over time, but perhaps first suppressed under the influence of contemporary politics and modern social norms, which continuously create a new “modern” image of society and understanding of nature. This begs the question, who was bothered by it and why, but I will deal with that topic another time.

In his book, in addition to numerous interesting stories, I came across the topic of falconry for the first time.