Gunter Tembrock - a Pioneer of Behavioural Biology Who Understood the Language of Animals

摘要

When Katharina Heinroth brought him a red fox to observe in 1948, his career was launched. Despite the wide range of animals, including humans, that Günter Tembrock studied in the course of his long career, he remained ‘the man with the foxes’, as Konrad Lorenz always referred to him. Although a generation younger than Lorenz, it was Tembrock who founded the first ethological research institute in Germany. During the period of rebuilding after WWII, Tembrock seized the opportunity in Berlin and established his Forschungsst?tte für Tierpsychologie at Humboldt University in September 1948, using a grant from the German Academy of Sciences. Under the old-fashioned name Tierpsychologie (animal psychology) he developed a complex research programme, reaching further than the concepts of comparative ethology, but anticipating what later would be called behavioural ecology.