Chapter Eight

The Ethologists

8.1 Konrad Lorentz shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and is regarded as one of the founders of the modern study of animal behaviour, no little part due to his study of the bonding behaviour of Greylag Geese.

8.2  In King Solomon's Ring, his famous account of his work for the general reader, he describes his pleasure in his lifetime's work.  "I know, too, something that is truly comforting: when I come home from my walk, these grey geese, now flying in company with wild migrants, will be standing on the steps in front of the veranda and they will come to greet me, their necks outstretched in that gesture which, in geese, means the same as tail-wagging in a dog. And, as my eyes follow the geese which, flying low over the water, disappear round the next bend of the river, I am all at once gripped by amazement as, with that wonderment which is the birth-act of philosophy, I suddenly start to query the familiar. We have all experienced that deeply moving sensation in which the most everyday things suddenly stare us in the face with altered mien as though we were seeing them for the first time.  Wordworth became conscious of this one day while contemplating the Lesser Celandine:

'I have seen thee, high and low
Thirty years or more, and yet
‘Twas a face I did not know;
Thou hast now, go where I may,
Fifty greetings in a day.'

As I watched the geese, it appeared to me as little short of a miracle that a hard, matter-of-fact scientist should have been able to establish a real friendship with wild, free-living animals, and the realization of this fact made me strangely happy. It made me feel as though man's explusion from the Garden of Eden had thereby lost some of its bitterness.

8.3 He was, accordingly to Julien Huxley, “one the outstanding naturalists of our day,” and “provider of an enormous volume of new facts and penetrating observations, with a style of distinction and charm, but in additional has contributed in no small degree to the basic principles and theories of animal mind and behaviour.”

8.4 Konrad so closely observed the lives of the animals around him, that he perceived their personalities, and feelings, not least their powerful emotion of bonding, a concept so powerful that it crossed into the science of human behaviour. In sensitizing the general public to the human qualities of animals, Konrad had a profound effect on our relationship with the world of Nature.  Although Konrad was a scientist, he enters this history of the contribution of the Arts to our relationship  to Nature because he was as much an artist as a scientist in the way he brought humanity to his study.

8.5 Julian Huxley wrote the following in his forward to King Solomon’s Ring: “Konrad Lorenz is one of the outstanding naturalists of our day. I have heard him referred to as the modern Fabre, but with birds and fishes instead of insects and spiders as his subject-matter. However, he is more than that, for he is not only, like Fabre, a provider of an enormous volume of new facts and penetrating observations, with a style of distinction and charm, but in addition has contributed in no small degree to the basic principles and theories of animal mind and behaviour. Lorenz has done more than any single man to establish the principles and to formulate the essential ideas behind them. And then Lorenz has given himself over, body and soul, to his self-appointed task of really understanding animals, more thoroughly than any other biologist-naturalist that I can think of. This has involved keeping his objects of study in what amounts to the wild state, with full freedom of moment. His readers will discover all that this has meant in the way of hard work and inconvenience – sometimes amusing in retrospect, but usually awkward enough or even serious at the time.”

8.6 And Lorenz explains the title to his book in his preface as follows: “As Holy Scripture tells us, the wise King Solomon, the son of David ‘spake also of beasts, and of fowl, and of creeping things, and of fishes” (I Kings iv. 33). A slight misreading of this text, which very probably is the oldest record of a biological lecture, has given rise to the charming legend that the kind was able to talk the language of animals, which was hidden from all other men. Although this venerable tale that he spake to the animals and not of them certainly originated from a misunderstanding, I feel inclined to accept it as a truth; I am quite ready to believe that Solomon really could do so, even without the help of the magic ring which is attributed to him by the legend in question, and I have very good reason for crediting, it: I can do it myself, and without the aid of magic rings in dealing with animals.

8.7 I am not joking by any means. IN so far as the ‘signal code’ of a species of social animal can be called a language at all, it can be understood by a man who has got to know its ‘vocabulary’, a subject to which a whole chapter in this book is devoted. Of course lower and non-social animals do not have anything that could, even in a very wide sense, be compared with a language, for the very simple reason that they do not have anything to say. For the same reason, it is impossible to say anything to them; it would indeed be exceedingly difficult to say anything that would interest some of the lower ‘creeping things’. But, by knowing the ‘ vocabulary’ of some highly social species of beast of bird it is often possible to attain to an astonishing intimacy and mutual understanding. “

8.8 One of the charms of reading his book is Lorenz’s love of his work, his animals and the beauty of the natural landscape they inhabit. He continues, “Before I begin, I must first of all describe the setting which forms the background for most of this book. The beautiful country flanking the Danube on either side in the district of Altenberg is a real ‘naturalist’s paradise’. Protected against civilization and agriculture by the yearly inundations of Mother Danube, dense willow forests, impenetrable scrub, reed-grown marshes and drowsy backwaters stretch over many square miles; an island of utter wildness in the middle of Lower Austria; an oasis of virgin nature, in which red and roe deer, herons and cormorants have survived the vicissitudes even of the last terrible war. Here, as in Wordsworth’ beloved Lakeland,

'The duck dabbles mid the rustling sedge
And feeding pike starts from the water’s edge
And heron, as resounds the trodden shore,
Shoots upward, darting his long neck before.'

8.9 Now imagine this queerly mixed strip of river landscape as being bordered by vine-covered hills, brothers to those flaking the Rhine, from whose crests the two early mediaeval castles of Greifenstein and Kreuzenstein look down with serious mien over the vast expanse of wild forest and water. Then you have before you the landscape which is the setting of this story-book, the landscape which I consider the most beautiful on earth, as every man should consider his own home country.”

8.10   Like Konrad Lorenz, Dr Servettaz turned his passion into a lifetime’s work which led to insights overlooked by those less attentive before him.

8.11   Lorenz helped change the way humans understood the behaviour of other animal species and even reflect upon the behaviour of their own species.  In doing so he illuminated  the deep and intimate connections between their  lives and our on this Earth. 

8.12 Dr Servettaz helped change the way his fellow citizens appreciated the wondrous qualities of water and our intimate dependency on this miraculous liquid. 

8.12  Like Konrad Lorenz. Dr Servettaz loved the unique beauty of the natural landscape in which he was privileged to spend his life and appreciated  the complex network of dependencies between the forms of life to be found there.  

8.13  They both devoted their lives to a cause, in Dr Servettaz's case the safeguarding of Lake Annecy, and as a result both brought great benefit to generations to come.

Continue Reading   Chapter Nine